SUMMER HIATUS

SUMMER HIATUS


It’s after the August long weekend, and I haven’t posted since before July First. My unplanned SUMMER HIATUS was stereotypically BC—going away on a short vacation, recharging after travelling, revelling in the summer music and arts festivals, and hosting the stream of summer visitors. (As Grandma used to call it: managing the Dew Drop Inn.) I did finish and mail four reviews, prepare and present a workshop, and read a couple of books for pure pleasure (Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam and his Atonement).

One of BC’s surprise summer visitors dropped into a small community off the northeast tip of Vancouver Island. Borne in her friend Jimmy Pattison’s yacht, American media icon, Forbes Magazine’s most powerful celebrity in the world, OPRAH WINFREY stopped for a short visit in Alert Bay the Friday of the long weekend. Oprah accepted an invitation to a potlatch, made a short speech, shook hands, kissed babies, hugged people, and posed for photographs. A visitation. A star descending, shining in our midst.

Oprah is absolutely one of my heroes. She’s intelligent and compassionate; she laughs, she celebrates, she educates, she models worldly and spiritual generosity. She uses her celebrity and her connections and her wealth to instigate positive change in the world.

But I stopped watching the Oprah show about seven years ago. I admit I do flick in to check what the topic is, and sometimes I’ll stay. Maybe for Dr. Oz. Or for Oprah and Gayle driving across America (because it’s about travel and friendship). Maybe for a good booktalk or author interview. But mostly, not. Not interested. Not interested any more.

I abandoned Oprah as a daily mentor back in 2000 when George Bush charmed the pants off her before his first election. Not that I’m a partisan or anything like that; as a Canadian, I can stand aloof, and peer over the border and shake my head at the shortcomings of their system, painfully aware that they do not even know how we cherry-picked from them when Canada was invented in 1867.

The main reason I abandoned the Oprah show is political, because, by allowing George II to charm her viewers, she played into the stereotype, the argument against extending the franchise to women because we are not smart enough to participate in important decisions, that we will vote emotionally, based on looks and charm, without really searching below the surface for the underlying issues. I’m not saying Oprah’s the only media person who has fallen for this, this dumbing down, but when she did it, back before 9/11, when the election was so close the winner wasn’t known for weeks, the results were pivotal, and have changed the course of world history. It paved the way for a weak president manipulated by interest groups acting out in ways that are illegal in international law and immoral to people who believe that violence against a by-standing nation was an inappropriate response to non-state terrorism.

The second reason that I am no longer a loyal watcher is cultural. Oprah seems like a wonderful person; she is a living embodiment of the American dream of equality of opportunity--that it doesn’t matter where you come from, where you start from; that any woman, by working hard, can become the richest woman in America; those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame. (Isn’t this the cultural tenet upon which the American health-care system is based?) Now that Oprah has her program, and a world-wide audience, and her own company, she can push her own agenda. One of her goals seems to be the increased integration of African-American culture into the American mainstream and thus, on to the world screen. This is probably a good thing, and noble of her, thinking about “her People” in the States as well as in Africa. But it can make many shows seem to be just infomercials for other media, American films and Broadway plays. Dream Girls, The Colour Purple, American Idol are not ones I am likely to watch or likely to get to see.

American media culture just isn’t that interesting to me, as a Canadian. I have enough already and I’m not looking for more. I’ll watch APTN whenever I can, for alternate perspectives, and listen to CBC radio for some world news not filtered through America. I do watch some CNN, but I see no evidence of better critical thinking there. The yelling, the presenting of opinion as if it is fact, is really offensive. I do like Anderson Cooper’s take on America, “keeping them honest”, showing how government fails the people, and, by public exposure, trying to shame elected officials into action. His stance highlights more that is great about Oprah, who tends to present the stories from the point of view of the people who are impacted, and tries to empower those people to take control and make change happen.

The fourth reason I’ve abandoned the Oprah show is the excess of pity parties, the emphasis on painful topics such as poor health, crime, irresponsibility, and abuse. I’m uncomfortable with the often not-so-subtle suggestion that a fairy-godmother is going to alight, sprinkle some stardust, and solve all problems by providing a new house or a decorator or a car or an organizer, etc. This emphasis on the charity of individual millionaires may make people feel good, but it does nothing to address the systemic issues which allow or create the inequalities in the first place. So maybe what I react to is the ultra-conservatism, the emphasis on individual responsibility and not on systems analysis and reform.

I really object to the insertion of emotionalism into the criminal justice system, the “public flogging and execution” mentality of the hunt for child molesters. Demonizing pedophiles risks turning them into murderers, the better to avoid detection. It is such a wrong and dangerous message to suggest that putting specific individuals in jail will ensure child safety. Not! Street-proof kids, protect them and teach them to protect themselves. No one can be “the catcher in the rye”. Analyze the origins of the perversions; every pedophile had a mother. What went wrong? Address the causes before the symptoms appear. Thoughts precede actions. If she chose to do so, Oprah could make the connection between the attitudes and errors of thinking of a pedophile and of an invading nation—the arbitrariness, the lack of empathy, the solipsism, the issues of control and being controlled by an outside force.

The final reason I abandoned the Oprah show is reruns, although one benefit of reruns is that they remind us of the cultural impact Oprah has in America. She introduces phrases that become part of pop culture—“you go, girl”, “this I know for sure”, “it takes a village”, “when we know better, we do better”. And she recognizes talent and gives others opportunity. Oprah has introduced stars such as Suze Orman, Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, and her annual garden party celebrating African-American women has become an American “event”.

As Canadians, don’t we have our own culture, our own myths and icons? Can’t we leave America to its own choices and concentrate on the issues at home? I wish we had a Canadian Oprah who would show us things we don’t want to look at about Canadian culture. Marilyn Denis does a comfortable job out of Toronto, but even she is bored with the repeat themes of decorating, makeovers, fashion, and food on CityLine. Are all women that limited, that only these superficials matter? CBC’s Gill Deacon is still finding her C-legs. She did a roundtable about the Slate article that attacked Oprah’s values for starting a school for girls in South Africa rather than doing something at home in America. They talked about the dumbing down, but I didn’t hear any mention that Oprah-bashing is woman-bashing. Donald Trump deserves values-scrutiny way more than Oprah, but who ever tries to challenge him? (Well, maybe Rosie, but look where that got her.) And Oprah-bashing, criticizing what the rich choose to do with their money, is really America-bashing, bashing the American dream. Oprah seems to want to make African Americans the same as rich white Americans, to even out the inequities rather than to think about the defining values of her nation.

My reasons for abandoning the Oprah show are about me, not about Oprah’s right to make the choices she makes. So what if they’re not always to my taste? I’m not even her target audience; no big deal. I still think she is the best and most human being on television. I respect her values. I do still buy the Oprah magazine, and Oprah.com is on my favourites list, mainly because being able to get the recipes off the Internet allows me to recycle the magazines, which I do once a year. That way, I’m saving a few Canadian trees while letting more readers enjoy Oprah’s wisdom. The glossy pages of the August edition are a perfect souvenir of a summer surprise. Who knows when she will drop back to BC in person again?

Sorry

SORRY

I whipped into the city to relax and visit and borrow a fast Internet connection. I live in a province where people go INTO the city to go to parks and to the beach. Walking downhill, down to the water, the bus that almost ran me down at the crosswalk was smiling and flashing SORRY SORRY SORRY across its forehead. And I thought, How Canadian! Like the way I habitually say THANK YOU to a canned drink dispensing machine, when the cold pop can kerPLUNKS.

The Seabus was disgorging its load of commuters just as I attempted to cross the walkspace so I had to wait and wait until the crowd thinned and the halt and the lame were sparse enough and slow enough to let me pass. My coffee cup was burning my fingers so I found a bench on the quay to sit and drink. I was waiting for film to be developed. Sorry. That’s so techno-obsolete, but soon, soon I’ll take the plunge and choose a digital camera.

Walking back up the mountain, I paused to rest at a convenient bus stop bench in the middle of the rise, hoping I wouldn't have to wave off a bus. Sorry to you!

And I stopped to take a picture of Mother Nature's garbage, giant hot pink blossoms littering the grass and the hedge beneath some tall flowering tree. Like the wild rose petals on my great room floor in the morning; the flowers are ephemeral, so delicate, so sweet-scented, so short-lived, but I have to bring some inside every June. It was the flowering trees that overwhelmed me when I first moved to this province. Whole trees in bloom. HO-LY. And this is Canada?

The Seven Wonders of Canada were announced this weekend: Pier 21, Old Quebec, Niagara Falls, the igloo, the canoe, the Rockies, and the prairie sky. BINGO. I got them all, or I would have if I had voted. Not that it was meant to be a horserace or something to place a bet on. Competition isn’t the point; it’s the excuse such ventures offer for us to come together, to strut our stuff, and to puff up our pride. Contests like this allow us to do something that we long to do, but something which in some ways we are still awkward doing—showing our LOVE, saying how much we LOVE this country.

My slow connection isn’t the real reason I didn’t vote. I just felt bad about voting, or not voting, for some nominations just because I’d never experienced them myself. And a majority vote isn’t really FAIR, because the more remote wonders would surely have had fewer visitors than say, Niagara, or Pier 21. Pier 21 hadn’t really been in my thoughts before, but when I think about it, probably both of my grandmothers arrived there, within a year or two of each other, a year or two before World War I, to begin new lives half a continent apart. It’s true; we do all have ARRIVAL stories.

Two on my STILL TO SEE Life List didn’t make it to the final seven, but both are World Heritage Sites and I’m still determined to see them someday. Haida Gwaii, BC, the misty isles, and Gros Morne, NL, where two tectonic plates almost meet. Bookends. Wondrous bookends for this beautiful land. But that’s just me. Wonder and books will always be connected. Like Wonder and Nature. Sorry, if that’s just SO CANADIAN.

Rites of Spring

Rites of Spring


It has been quite a while since I had time to sit and think. The rites of spring seem to include end-of-semester and exam-time stress, weekend work, administration, and typical institutional SNAFUs. Soon. Courses will all be over soon.

My rhodos are in full glory, plus the late tulips, and the dandelions are dug. Dogwood blossoms like mini-moons light the new green of the wildwood. Picking annuals for the hanging baskets and deck pots was fun; I planted them in spite of the anxiety about frost. Today I was driving home through a blizzard of pink; strong winds had ripped the petals from the plum trees and were blowing them in curls and swirls along the grey pavement and into drifts along the curb. The slinking curves tracing the breath of the wind are like flakes gliding down iced roads in the coldest of prairie winters, their white on silver equally as beautiful in a yin and yang sort of way.

A bundle of books for review arrived; I finished three; my favourite so far is The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks by Robert Bringhurst who points out, in one of the lectures, that the word “human” has the same root as “humus”, meaning “of the earth”. I like the idea that “humans” are “earthlings” and “humanities” are “earth studies”. I’m rewarding myself with a week to read the bookclub book—Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Loving it. A Ulysses/Mrs. Dalloway third person stream of consciousness. One day in the life of a London neurologist named Henry Perowne--an intelligent, articulate, “a-motional” scientist, a biological determinist, whose every speech and action is driven by intention. Who is connected to the world through television news, driving, and shopping, and to his wife, his poet daughter, his mother in the home, colleagues, patients, the men who crashed into his Mercedes, the squash partner he attempts to dominate, his blues-playing son. It is a luxurious read, topped with the luxury of reading outside on the warm deck. The yard still smells heavenly green.

In the interim between blogs, since Imas was news, there was another mass shooting on a campus and more discussion of how to protect the innocents and a little bit about how to help the mentally ill. Angry disaffected men shot the Kennedys, Dr. King, Malcolm X, John Lennon, students from a Texas university tower, at Montreal’s Ecole Polytech, at Columbine high school, at Dawson College, at Virginia Tech. Not to mention the massacres in New Zealand, and the kindergarten children in Scotland. And those who bombed the Air India flight and the Oklahoma federal building. And trashed the WTC towers. It is as if these guys know the rules to some perverted game. Celebrities score high; for ordinary victims, you have to rack up the hits to grab media attention, to make the news. Why? What does it mean? How can we prevent it? What has to change?

The best thing I heard in my inter-blog days was an interview on CBC radio with the psychotherapist Barbara Coloroso. She is an expert on bullying [The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander] and has just written a book on genocide, Extraordinary Evil; she makes connections. She says it is a mistake to view bullying as a “conflict” and to call in the participants as if they are equals for a conflict resolution, with the mediator trying to maintain objectivity. I’ve seen this with television therapists dumping on a partner struggling to free her/himself from the domination and disrespect of a bullying spouse, and not getting a fair hearing from the “objective” doctors. Giving each side equal respect and benefit of the doubt condones the bullying and re-victimizes the victim for attempting to stand up for and defend him/herself. Everyone knows that bullies seek out those they perceive as weaker, those who have no backup; often, bullies push their targets to react just to get them into trouble. Even calling the police and threatening charges can be part of the bully’s repertoire. Is building a bomb or picking up a gun the same pathology? All show lack of empathy, lack of respect, cruelty, yet there seems to be some difference in the displaced anger.

It makes me think too about the rules of hockey, the players who overreact to a bully, the relationship between bullying and enforcing, and between enforcing and the bench—the expectations of coaches and managers, of owners and of fans wanting to win the Cup. How to be a winner and how to be a man. Checking. Shooting. Aggression. Violence. Inflicting pain on others in order to achieve your goals. It’s the way the game is played. Yet it seems a pretty safe bet that none of the disaffected shooters ever played hockey. This could be a clue.

I’m still reading Saturday on the deck. Set in February, 2003, post-9/11, Henry’s flights of memory and diagnosis and analysis are triggered by sensory experiences sparking something chemical within his brain. And in his world, that’s how everything happens. Chemical and physical signals trigger all actions, including violence. When a professor tried to teach his daughter that “insanity is a social construct”, Henry took her to a locked psych ward and cured her with evidence to the contrary. To a biological determinist neurologist, madness is chemical and physical, not something that will disappear if we start to think differently about maladaptive behaviours. I feel myself not wanting to finish the book, wanting to stay in Henry’s world as long as possible. It is somehow comforting to know that there are men like him in the world. Oh, right. This is fiction.

The wind which had been blowing the pink drifts came up stronger than ever and I went inside to avoid flying trees and branches. I slid open the window, the better to hear it with, and to invite in the scent of rain on wet moss and earth. And the phone rang with news of the arrival of a baby on one of the young branches of our family tree, a girl with a beautiful green name, Jade. I wrapped the gift I had already bought on spec, a pink cardigan with a pink flower, and tucked in a card saying “welcome to this world”.

Collage Workshop

Collage Workshop

The Collage Workshop two Saturdays ago was wonderful. Organized by the art gallery for Arts and Culture Week, twelve of us sat at a big table cutting and pasting for seven hours straight. This is an art form I love, making something out of nothing, recycling, appropriating the beautiful images from magazines and using them for something other. And there were twelve totally different results. It’s the creative process that interests me. Why do this? Because it’s fun and challenging. What to do with the end project when it’s made? Well, in this case, they are framed and hung in the gallery for a while, and then ready to hang at home. So the collage will have a decorative element, and must be appropriate for public display. No problem. But what to do? What image? What colours? What will it look like? What will it say?

We looked at examples in the gallery’s Collage Exhibit, which included some three-dimensional sculptures. The facilitator suggested that we could pick a favourite photograph and “transcribe” it into a different medium; we could make a montage of words or images; we could do something inspired by the special papers or the clippings we find. I checked the list of ideas I had before the workshop and decided to go with the Breakthrough engraving. I don’t know the artist’s name but I think it’s an engraving from the Renaissance, of a man on his knees crawling away from the civilized fields and the one tree and bursting through the circle of the globe into a light-filled heaven. I call it Breakthrough but it’s probably meant to be a “pilgrim’s progress” genuflecting, prostrating oneself into heaven.

I know I respond especially to colour; I found myself collecting clippings of gold, sand, white, and blue. An abandoned cheese tray was the template for the circles. My collection of bride images yielded only one suitable clipping. I found a beautiful bare tree in shades of midnight blue. When I tried to explain what I had done to some at the table, I realized that in my “restorying” of this image, a female figure is moving in the opposite direction, up from a white seashell beach through music into an earthworld of darkness and pain and beauty. I cannot say that evolution was my intended theme; it was just that I couldn’t find a figure facing the other direction. That might be biological determinism, as our magazines are all laid out to open on the right. Whatever the reason, in my collage, earthlings emerge. Such is the creative process.

I check my dictionary. Collage: a kind of surrealist art in which bits of flat objects, newspapers, cloth, pressed flowers, etc., are pasted together in incongruous relationship for their symbolic or suggestive effect. Montage: the art or process of making a composite picture by bringing together into a single composition a number of different pictures or parts of pictures and arranging these, as by superimposing one on another, so that they form a blended whole while remaining distinct. Why didn’t I look these up sooner? The title of my montage is ReStorying.

The dictionary also reminds me that my favourite medium is words.

On the Verge

On the Verge

I’m on the verge of cancelling my cable television—at least for a “summer hiatus” and not solely out of spite for the fact that Coronation Street has been usurped for the hockey playoffs.

What exactly is a verge? Something like a curb? But we use it as if it means an edge. So, my Webster’s says, a verge is: a rod, wand, or stick carried at the beginning of a procession. Nope. The edge, brink, or margin of something. OK. The line, border, boundary enclosing something, especially something inside the circle. OK.

This week on cable television CNN the big American story is “Shock Jock Don Imus Fired for Shocking Words”. A shock jock is by definition a disc jockey who tries to be edgy, to push the boundaries. But rather than pushing the boundaries of thought, they seem to make a virtue out of pushing the boundaries of taste. Like the attention-seeking neediness of an adolescent class clown, these guys (all right, there are a couple of gals in there too, like Dr. Laura and Ann Coulter), these commentators see which powerless person or group they can insult today and how much that will increase their ratings with their listeners. Imus, about whom I would never have heard if he hadn’t been a guest on Larry King, insulted a women’s basketball team with comments, ripped from hip-hop lyrics, that were racist, sexist, ageist, and elitist. (He was laughing at their skin colour, their tattoos, their hair, their looks, and their assumed sexual availability). The media debate is about where the line is and did he cross it. About whether the line shifts depending on which race you belong to. About the unintended effects upon the victims of the so-called jokes--“These girls didn’t need this stress at exam time when they should be celebrating a great basketball year”. About being a good person but doing a bad thing (Imus’ defense). About being fired from two networks, CBS & MSNBC, for doing what he has been hired and paid to do for years. (Imus was fired after the protest from Black American media people prompted advertisers to pull out, not because of any ethical guideline or verge of decency or human dignity he crossed.) Finally, the media debate is about corporations making billions of dollars selling the same words to white teens buying hip-hop music.

This is such an American story, reflecting adolescent attitudes and focussing on celebrity and personality rather than on anything important. The shock jock phenomenon puts “freedom of speech” above all other American freedoms. In Canada, our values and our laws are different. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (celebrating twenty-five years this week) guarantees freedom of opinion and freedom of expression but it also guarantees equality and the protection of human dignity. It stresses that tolerance defines a multi-cultural country. In the same way the Charter makes it illegal for any one group to pass a law which would take away the human rights of another group, so too we expect that no individual, no matter how much he or she wags about ‘free speech’, would be allowed to disparage the human dignity of another individual or group (with one exception, if it is said in parliament). We expect people to be tolerant and respectful. We expect that, if a person is prejudiced and the prejudice leads them to discriminate against others, they will not be allowed to do so while holding public positions of authority. We do not encourage the public expression of intolerance and prejudice (perhaps Don Cherry is an exception); we do not seek out or encourage the public expression of unprocessed anger (with the exception of those television stations which specialize in sticking microphones in the faces of grieving victims). We have laws against hateful speech.

Laws of libel and slander are similar in both countries; lawsuits are only successful if it can be proven that the ‘free speaker’ INTENDED to cause harm. Intending to cause harm is not the same as intending to grab media attention to increase your ratings and to bring in more advertising dollars by seeming outrageously ‘free’. Does free speech mean freedom without responsibility to others? Does it mean the freedom to pursue the almighty dollar no matter who gets hurt? Does it mean the freedom to perpetuate the worst of the way we used to be--hierarchical, patriarchal, sexist, ageist, and “other”-phobic? Not in Canada, please. I can exercise the freedom to change channels or to sever the cable completely.

Webster lists seven noun definitions for verge, covering everything from watch-making and roofing to feudal law. And the verb to verge means to lean towards, to be in transition, to approach. And a verger is the person who carries the verge. The word arrived into English through Old French from the Latin for twig, virga. So this is the best reason of all for cancelling cable. All those untended virgas all over my lot, and all the sprightly dandelion greens hiding beneath them. And the glorious spring smell. Here in BC they call it the balm of Gilead, which is a fancy name for the smell of cottonwoods in spring, when they exude resin. It is so beautiful, it feels as if I’m on the verge of bursting with too much pure pleasure.

JUNQUE

JUNQUE—Creating a So-called Life

2007.04.06
Good Friday, and I'm going to a friend's for supper. Yesterday was cheque day, so I permitted myself to cruise the secondhand stores again. This is a bit of discipline for me; I have no money, but years of habit mean I still crave “retail therapy” for fun and profit. So I limit my cravings to the secondhand (junque, thrift) stores and garage sales. It is a throwback to “hunting and gathering”, I am sure. If I had more productive hobbies, it would be something like gardening—growing flowers, producing vegetables. The lack of topsoil and the rocky creek bed that is my lot is my excuse. The last time I visited Winnipeg, my best friend Karen and I hit every junque store in the city. It was a great day. Even though we live 3000 kilometres apart, we still stay connected. The time she visited me here, last spring break, was one of the highlights of my life.

Junquing (as is antiquing) is also a form of treasure hunting, and today was a good day. At New2You I found a paperback book that is the script for FARGO, one of my favourite movies, because of the humour and the characters and the twisted plot and, to be truthful, the incredibly beautiful snow and blizzard scenes. Minnesota and North Dakota are just American versions of southern Manitoba; even the accents are similar. I feel so at home in Fargo (the movie). It has a great introduction about story-telling by Ethan, one of the Coen brothers. It is not easy to find scripts. The only other one I have is PULP FICTION, another of my favourite movies, which has absolutely nothing to do with Manitoba. Anyway, I bought the script and an elegant looking mug in my new great-room colours, for a quarter.

Then I went to the art gallery to check out the collages again. I spoke to the artist-on-duty, a wonderful painter from Agassiz, who said that she often works on ideas in her head for three to ten years before the actual painting on canvas emerges. This was reassuring, as I have only 22 days left before the collage workshop. These are the ideas I am mulling so far: a personalized version of the Breakthrough engraving; something about the 200th anniversary of Simon Fraser’s shooting the river; and maybe an introvert/extrovert triptych. If I do some prep, maybe I can make more than one at the workshop. New Idea: maybe I could work my two article themes into a collage—Lions in Vancouver, Who Shot Rambo? I’d really need a colour printer to do that effectively. I have already gathered my gold flakes, old collages (placemats/book covers, canisters), illustrated poems--Bridal Falls, stickers. The Breakthrough engraving would make a good pattern. I've found a Gary Snyder quote that fits it. “I go to meet that blundering, clumsy, beautiful, shy world of poetic, archetypal, wild intuition that’s not going to come out into the broad daylight of the rational mind but wants to peek in.” (from a poetry calendar my friend Carol gave me). I must remember my visuals files and other stickers.

After the art gallery, I walked to the community services thrift store. The volunteer clerk was the woman who had the first garage sale of the season (where I grabbed her coffee cup and spilled coffee all over the table). Neither of us mentioned this detail, but I did ask her whether the square plates had sold. She said there were still some there; pause; so I asked “And are you having another garage sale?” to which she said, “Yes, in May” so I said “I’ll watch for the announcement.” I need to see them in good light and to pick ones that will look good on top of my Solitude pattern (Mikasa) dishes—white with a black and platinum ring. I love dishes even though I rarely entertain any more. It has to do with being a Hestia woman. ( see Jean Bolen, Goddesses in Every Woman).

2007.04.01
Tenth anniversary of the Art Gallery; so crowded I had to leave. But not before I had checked out the Backroom, the Collage Display. I remember On Grandma’s Back Step with kids, house wall, and birch logs woodpile. A globe with I Am A Rock, No Man Is an Island, & Marshall McLuhan quotes. Mount Hope computer enhanced series with close-ups and day/night views. A Tower. Boxes. A corrugated cardboard exercise painted silver and a brown one “free to a good home”, both very pleasing. A “garden” of giant abstract flowers (made of round shrimp trays, I hear). A clothesline collage. Some photos re-done in paper—waves and beaches. And a yellowed collage newsprint behind a red filter. And a collage definition of Collage which I wish I had copied down. Now I’m totally confused. Too many choices. I won’t know what to choose to do, at the gallery’s collage workshop which I registered for for April 28.

2007.03.17
This morning I braved the horrendous traffic (two highways closed; spring break weekend) to go to the FIRST garage sale (GS) of the season, on Skylark. I had to look up where the street was (but that’s partly why I love garage saleing, learning the streets, and inexpensive entertainment). I have a $2 limit, unless some special circumstances make an object irresistible for me. I never go for the start time (too crowded, too much rushing of tables and fighting for bargains). It was a good one (GS), with a lot of variety and even some new stuff. I bought a new sheet that hadn’t been unfolded for $1.50; black and white looking gray with red surprises, which I will use for re-decorating. I’ve been trying to switch the great-room colours from forest green to blacks, grays, and taupes, with scarlet surprises. I also bought a small black ceramic vase, for the colour, and as part of my vase collection which is still mostly in boxes. The embarrassing part was when I grabbed this large pottery coffee mug (on my list, grande size) and spilled hot coffee all over the table display, because it was the owner’s morning coffee, and not for sale. The second embarrassment was when I was leaving there was this horrible smell and steam wafting off my car hood so I popped it and looked but could see nothing out of the ordinary. (What did I expect to see I’m not sure? But there were no flames, or bubbling oil puddles, etc.) A guy was walking to his car and I saw him twitch his nose so I asked him: Can you smell that? Is it my car? He was polite and helpful and said, I can smell it and it’s not your car, as it was here before you got here; I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. But that was all the info I needed. As long as I’m not going to explode, or burst into flames. . . I waved and smiled as I made a Uie and headed back to the crowded highway and Exit 170.

It’s a good day on television too, as March 17 seems to be more and more an Irish, American, and Canadian celebration day. Bravo Channel 43 has an all-Ireland film day. Early in the morning it was something called The Last September? about the Black & Tans and British occupying army around WWI. Then Dancing at Lughnasa with Meryl Streep; I’ve seen it before and some famous writer wrote it, but I’m still not clear about the story. Women’s tough lives in papist-1937 Ireland, pagan rites, madness, irresponsible men. Then it was Far and Away with Tom and Nicole; I didn’t realize it was so much set in Ireland, in the 1890s, and their running away to Boston where patterns repeat themselves. Way too much boxing and wrestling for my taste. I only remember seeing the land rush scene before, so I guess that’s why I didn’t think it was set elsewhere. Lots of famous faces (Clint, Colm) but characters seem a bit cartoonish. I guess that is true to the American stereotype-Irish. The ones (Irish movies) I would like to see again are Ryan’s Daughter (Robert Mitchum, Julie Christie), The Commitments, and Darby O’Gill and the Little People, because I can’t remember the story (but still love Sean Connery). I’d like to see for the first time the Liam Neilson political bio, was it called Michael Collins? And I loved the one In the Name of the Father, with Daniel Day Lewis, about the wrongly convicted / falsely imprisoned, but there wasn’t a lot set outside England. The prison scene of the fire memorial is fantastic.

Rivers and Bridges

Rivers and Bridges

I was born in Rivers, Manitoba. I love the sound of it—borne in rivers. I grew up near Oak River, Manitoba; I have ties, emotional and ancestral, to the Kettle River, and now I live along the Fraser River in British Columbia, Canada. I graduated from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg: Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English and History; Certificate in Education; Master of Arts in English (Canadian Literature). I have a Permanent Professional Teaching Certificate.

I have travelled much of Canada, from Whitehorse, Yukon and Vancouver, BC to Montreal and Quebec City; Newfoundland and the ancestral home in New Brunswick are still on my life TO DO list. I’ve been to western, northern, and central states, and to the southern tip of Florida (to see Hemingway’s Key West, of course). I’ve visited Ireland (Dublin, Tullamore, Mullingar, Clonmacnoise, Galway, & Clara, County Offaly; don’t you just love the sounds of them?), Cornwall (Land’s End, Tintagel), and Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Peterhead, the Isle of Skye). I have worked in rural, northern, and urban Canada, in education, social services, and corrections, before devoting myself to writing. It took me a while to realize that what I was really doing was collecting stories.

My passions include narrative, the literary and visual arts, photography, human rights, nature, spirit, and Canadian identity. I love words and word play, and Scrabble. If I weren’t a boring ex-teacher and writer, I imagine myself as a stand-up comedienne. (People laugh when I tell them that, as I am the most un-funny person they have ever met.) Who makes me laugh the hardest? Norm Macdonald. I also admire: Jim Carrey, Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Shawn Majunder, the Indo-Newfie, and in his own perverted way, Sean Cullen. And Billy Connelly. Oh yes, and Steve Burgess, because he was born in Rivers too. I don’t know him, but I follow his columns in The Tyee.ca.

For music, give me Lyle, Loreena, and Leonard (Lovett, McKennitt, and Cohen), Neil Young, Jim Byrnes, and Jann Arden. My next purchase will be Tom Waits. I watch way too much television—-news, traffic reports, CNN, Coronation Street, Law & Order, CSI, Criminal Minds, Bones, Grey’s Anatomy, Heartbeat, and House. And of course, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. If I’m not watching television, the radio is always on—CBC only. Radio One. The last movies I went to see: the Leonard Cohen documentary I’m Your Man, made in Australia, the Prairie Home Companion, and Capote (shot in Winnipeg). My favourite actor is the guy who played Hamish Macbeth, and Hitler, and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, and The Full Monty, and Trainspotting, and Angela’s Ashes. It’s coming . . . RC, Carlyle, Robert Carlyle! And Juliette Binoche, especially in The English Patient. And Judi Dench, especially in Mrs. Brown. I re-watched recently The Lion King and The Last Emperor, for research. The next movies I want to see will be: The Queen and Casino Royale.

I read about one book a week, some of them for reviews. I just read The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacob; I think our book club will be discussing it next. We went to the launch. Before that, I reviewed a book of lit crit, Margaret Laurence’s Epic Imagination. Margaret Laurence is my favourite writer, partly because the places and the people she wrote about are “my people”. The Diviners is my favourite novel. I also enjoyed Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You, which covers similar themes of adult female emancipation and self-actualization. I also just finished Nicole Kraus’ The History of Love and have just started Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Both are wonderful. I have several manuscripts circulating and I’m working on a short story about the Green Man.

I tutor every day and I spend too much time at my computer, sometimes just playing Solitaire. It helps me to switch channels in my muddy stream of consciousness. The river’s current is swift. “I have been a bridge for the crossing over of three score rivers.” I can’t remember where I found this quote but I love the sound of it.