summer in honduras

I have a garden this summer. A fantastically big garden that we planted with, let's see, tomatoes, spinach, cucumbers, zuchini, lettuce, garlic, beets, radishes and various herbs. And, for good measure, strawberries and blueberries. All I want to do is kneel over it and weed. Day in and day out.

The earth is rich here - silty and loamy and shaking with worms. They say it's some of the best earth in the country. This farm - this little farmlette - fell into my lap. But one of the reasons I made the leap of faith and took it, and carved out this garden, was to share it with Big Kid. But she, however, will have none of it.

She only spent a week in Honduras, but it was not enough and too much. Her group stayed in San Matias, a village of mud. They were forced to cut their tour in half because of the coup (and the media circus that followed that panicked parents and pressured the school). And now she feels undone and at loose ends. And too rich and too privileged and too bountiful. She spent almost the entire time drastically ill, but also hiding it, not wanting to complain in front of her hosts. She got up at 4 every morning and helped with whatever work was at hand. She won't do that at home, but I suppose at home it's not real work. Just as life here is not real life. That's how she feels, I think. And that's how I feel sometimes too.

Weeding and dreaming and walking and building and talking and, oh yeah, working every now and then - just enough to pay the bills - then weeding and dreaming and walking and building all over again. It's not real life, is it. It's something but I don't know what it is.

I had a chat with a new neighbour in the city the other day and we found out we were both filmmakers. He, retired and me, never quite. I told the familiar story: when Big Kid was born I abandoned freelancing for stability. And then I found myself segueing into the real truth. I knew it was the truth because it became harder and harder to say and my face turned red and I just wished he'd go back into the house already and stop this yammering. What I told him was that I abandoned it all for comfort. I told him that comfort pulls you down with flattering chatter, and it feels good and you think you're going somewhere and it feels like you're doing something. But you're not. You're sinking and you're mute and you're getting quite, quite still.

But oh, the chair you just bought is so very comfortable. Stay in it. Stay.

My kid is 16 and yearns for the world like all kids her age do. She doesn't want comfort, she wants to explode. I gave her comfort all her life, prided myself on it. But I see now that my job has changed. It's to help her explode without getting burnt. Controled explosion, if you will.

So now, her Honduran family waits to see if the leftist Zelaya wrests back his power from the elites who resented his willingness to challenge them. There's nothing comfortable about their lives. Not one single thing, from when they get up at 4am to when they drop back on their beds at 10pm. And when you're suspended between those two worlds - one of contentment, the other of difficulty - what do you do? What do you do when you're 16, except explode?

Controlled explosions. Sometimes devastation, sometimes just fireworks. We'll have to weed and see.

et si j'ai dit que je t'aime

What then?

the school bell rings at 9 am

my little one dissolves into a froth of children
the walk home is long.

sycamore

I've just deleted HUNDREDS of songs from my hard drive and it gives me a unique thrill. I would not be so happy throwing away vinyl or trashing CDs. But there is something about too much music jamming up your hard drive that is obscene. When did it become more about quantity than quality?

Remember scanning other people's record or CD collections? Long conversations would ensue about this artist or that, and they would haul out all the related titles and you'd talk for hours - or at least long minutes - about other related artists, the true origins of a genre, or why so and so is such a derivative hack.

Now, when you talk music it's all about the hardware and numbers. Where do you store your music? How much music do you have? And unless showing off is your thing, the conversation ends there.

So, I'm sick of all these songs gumming up the works. But one of the unintended consequences of deleting - like going through your wardrobe as you junk all your old clothes - is coming across those bits of archaia you forgot all about. Those unique little gems that you just have to keep cause who knows where or when you'll come across it again.

Sycamore by Bill Callahan is that song today. I don't know who this guy is or how I came across this song, but it's a keeper. The unadorned voice, lyrics that slide from highly personal to slightly metaphoric. The lilting melody. The sweet picking. This is not a great video, and he's riffed slightly from the studio version that I have, but it's a good approximation.

All you want to do is be the fire part of fire...

pro-hypocrite

In the wake of the murder of George Tiller this week, the American doctor who performed late-term abortions in Kansas, Rachel Maddow goes through the past 20 years of, as she so rightly calls it, violence and terrorism in the name of life. While the issue is not nearly so divisive in Canada, we still have to put up with American-influenced right-wing elements that push against the availability of legal abortions here.

It is important to call this what it is: TERRORISM.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

this one's going to last forever

This was a tough review to write. I didn't like the book, the author lives in my neighbourhood and we probably know people in common, she's a young author and I didn't want to stomp on her. But I really, really didn't like the book. What are publishers thinking??

THERE WAS A KIDS' SHOW years ago that had a puppet who sang This is the song that never ends, it goes on and on my friends… That singing lamb never shut up. I sing it to myself sometimes, like halfway through Nairne Holtz’s second book, This One’s Going to Last Forever. Maybe because the title paraphrases it. Or maybe because the book reminded me of my brother-in-law who won’t stop talking. While the details of the conversation may occasionally be interesting, the substance is just never there. So my eyes glaze over and I dig in for the long haul.

In this collection of short stories and a novella, Holtz trots out a mangy crew of characters around whom revolve tales of love lost, anaemically fought for, then lost again. Nicky works in a parking garage and has a crush on Nathalie, a supposedly straight chick. She goes for the chase but loses the girl when she comes off too macho. A small-town gay Elvis impersonator performs drive-through marriages, and sleeps with a straight man on the side. Anna has lost her leg because her girlfriend crashed their car, but now the only person who offers her anything close to genuine love is a suburban man with an amputee fetish. Clara is a naive student who finds herself negotiating fault lines between extremes of both love and politics. Kelly and Sonya are lovers for whom boredom and bickering are both resolved by heroin.

Intriguing characters all, but they rattle around in settings that are more bone than flesh. Except for the immediate dilemmas of the plots, characters are described rather than inhabited. Many of them stand in for wincingly facile caricatures: in “Knives and Forks,” the narrator is visiting Lou’s apartment and is surprised to discover that “although Lou was a lesbian, her offerings were not politically-minded: there was nothing local, organic, fair trade, or vegan on display.”

Throughout the stories a code of identity politics is used as shorthand, replacing original description or commentary: apartments are described as either bourgeois or bohemian, hairstyles are markers of social order, and attractiveness is measured against reality TV. While in some hands these would be the tools of a biting social critique, Holtz merely cuts her losses and moves on to the next quick quip.

Perhaps hoping for a bit of gravitas, the Polytechnic killings pop up in the middle of “Are You Committed,” the novella of the collection. Clara, Mike and Bruno, roommates as well as co-workers at the McGill Daily, conduct some predictable soul-searching. Mike is sure he would have come to the women’s rescue, Bruno collapses into self-pity, and Clara retreats from them both, exploring the politics and the lesbians at the Women’s Union. She falls for a woman but the affair sours because neither is willing to truly commit, so she returns to her old roommates and renews the lease for another year.

The era and student politics of that period are nicely captured, and there are some sweet turns of phrase (“The double-peck could not have been gentler, yet Clara felt it like an indent.”), but the overall effect is glib. The killings, for example, serve their purpose and two pages later are dropped and not brought up again.

In interviews Holtz has described her dedication to writing and the discipline it takes to actually produce, criticizing those who have chosen comfort over art. This is her second book, the first being The Skin Beneath, a sort of lesbian mystery novel. She also co-edited the anthology No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian. Discipline and dedication she has in spades.

But to those two I would suggest adding depth. Without it you’re just another singing lamb.

time precious time

Fleetwood Mac was popular when I was in high school, though I didn't care for them much. They were top 40 and I was into Lou Reed and Patti Smith and early punk. But just a couple of months ago I was at PAs (can you believe they have a website?) getting some food. This vaguely familiar song started to play and I stopped in my tracks. I listened to the whole thing while pretending to choose between spaghettini and fetucini. It was Gypsy. It stayed in my head for days until bam! I realized it was Stevie Nicks. I looked up everything I could find of hers and downloaded it. It was like a new discovery. Listening to Landslide breaks my heart every time.

I think what I love most about rediscovering older acts is watching them age. Seeing what they bring to lyrics they wrote when they were younger and barely mortal. Time makes you bolder/Children get older/I'm getting older too.

This morning I discovered Time Precious Time by Lindsey Buckingham. Never heard it before. I don't really know him except that he played in Fleetwood Mac and was once partnered with Stevie Nicks. But who is this guy playing gorgeous guitar and crooning about time. There's a video of him on YouTube playing it. He's older. He holds the guitar like it's the only thing keeping him afloat. At the end of the song he is so grateful, so thankful. Would he have been so humble 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago, when he was young and ambitious? I don't think so. But so much time has passed and he's grey and wrinkled and old (60 this year). Time is just so, so, so precious.

The sound quality is not great, but this is the best version I could find.

blogging the blue met 3

IMPENETRABLE IN TRANSLATION: Nicole Brossard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood are conferring with one of the festival organizers. It’s already past the hour and there’s a trickle of people still coming in. They are wondering about what language to use to present the duo. The presenter, it seems, is an anglophone. But Brossard shrugs it off, saying ”tout le monde parle les deux langues.” And so we do. And with that, the anglo presenter introduces a Francophone writer who in turn introduces her bilingual translator. They flip open the book and read.

It’s Fences in Breathing, Brossard’s most recent novel. She’s a Quebec institution, a lesbian icon, a maverick of experimental fiction. I’ve always found her work impenetrable and distracting. I wish there were more people here, more lesbians especially. Don’t those two tell their friends when they have events going on? But just stop right there because Fences in Breathing is the best title ever. I don’t know what it means and I don’t care. It’s one of those titles that’s lived inside some sort of protective carapace since the Mesozoic era until one day along came a brilliant translator who got fed up with the French title, La capture du sombre, and doesn’t care about the stuffy meaning either, just the music, and she conjures it up out of a hat whose bottom reaches through tens of thousands of years of bones.

There are a lot of bones down there, bones of ideas that form into words. Whether they become proper sentences or just run-on curses is a matter of evolution. We forget that everything, even our thoughts and the various shapes they take, have been winnowed through time tunnels, their gangly edges eroded and shaved off. Sometimes a new thought or word bursts through and creates a tunnel of its own, and all the little thoughts scamper after it squealing “me too! me too!”

Sunday afternoon might be an escorted trip through a new tunnel. At the 1 p.m. panel, The World Around Us, four writers will talk about the impact of evolutionary change: Tijs Goldschmidt (Darwin’s Dreampond - we killed an African lake), Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters - dying to eat), Taras Grescoe (Bottomfeeder - the fish are disappearing), Erika Ritter (The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath - the dog’s dead).

Each of these writers has gone into that pile of bones and come up with a piece of something huge: one’s got the nose, the other the tail and the others have body parts yet to be identified. Come to the panel and take a look at the elephant in the room.

blogging the blue met 2

POET AND PROPHET: Tears were shed last year when Mahmoud Darwish died. By those who had only read hundreds of his poems, and by those who had only read one or two. The worst criers were those who’d read none at all but knew he was a great Palestinian poet, a poet of the struggle - a description he grew to dislike.

As the room fills up for an hommage to Mahmoud Darwish, no one is crying but all of us want to. Issa Boulatta, Naim Kattan, Georges Abou-Hsab, John Asfour, and moderator May Telmissany, speak variously of his life (born in 1941 in Palestine; subsequently jailed many times) and death (born in 1941 in Palestine; subsequently jailed many times). But, être palestinien n’est pas un metier, quotes Georges Abou-Hsab, and so Darwish was not really the poet of politics but of dignity. For some, a radical distinction. I have aged, mother, so bring back the childhood stars/so that I/along with the swallows/can chart the path/back to your waiting nest.

Language makes us strangers too. I wonder who are the strangers here. The room is full and eclectic: young, old, Arab, non-Arab, francophone, anglophone. The speakers switch from Arabic and then to either French or English. May Telmissany acquits herself well in all three. She reads his poetry and, for the last one, chokes up. The language is too much. Someone cries for Mahmoud Darwish.

There are no questions afterward and, so, no answers. I go upstairs and check out John Ralston Saul. Now there’s a man I can’t imagine crying, not for long anyways, not when he’s got another book to write. He’s saying that the most important thinking being done in Canada is happening in the Supreme Courts and in the royal commissions. He wonders why the CBC doesn’t interview native leaders for other subjects than native issues. All actions have to be seen through the filter of language and memory, he says. We need a new language to frame the future because the old language is keeping us in the past. Mahmoud Darwish once said that the only modern thing in the Arab world is its literature, especially its poetry.

John Ralston Saul and Mahmoud Darwish would have had a great time together. What if they had co-written a poem, what would it be like? That’s a burning question so I’ll take a stab:

My mother is cold
My lover is snow
The polar bears are closer
than ever before.

• 

blogging the blue met

I'm mining my own stuff for this blog now - ain't that lazy. The Blue Metropolis literary festival is on now and I'll be blogging it for the next few days. Here's the first entry:

BIG IDEAS, SMALL CONFUSIONS: The lobby, hallways and mezzanine are empty when I get to the Delta Hotel. Airplanes could take off here. An old gentleman wanders by, unsure. I recognize him as Zakaria Tamer, the Syrian author of Breaking Knees, and hold out my hand, mention I reviewed his book for the Rover, and loved it. My bad Arabic deceives him and he switches to it, telling me animated stories of sex and cab drivers and good home-cooked meals. At least that’s what I understood.

Zakaria Tamer is here to receive the second annual Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher prize, named after a 17th century Arab poet from the Gulf region, and sponsored by the serious-sounding Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. (They’re happy in the Gulf when culture has authority.)

Inside the Versailles room people mingle. Well, all ten of us. Festival director Linda Leith is happy to see Mr Tamer, until he launches into a complaint about being stranded at the airport for an hour with no one to pick him up. She holds her own and smiles big smiles. Crossed e-mails. Busy staff. It’s a big festival, don’tcha know. Two hours, two hours. And he hardly speaks English, let alone French. Then another fellow beside him has a complaint. Another Arab man with a complaint. Leith smiles even more.

By the time Issa Boullata, former McGill professor and scholar, is introducing Tamer there are twenty of us in the room. Why not more? Where is the Syrians community? Why do we show up in droves when there is anger to spew and justices to be righted and enemies to be toppled - but not to listen to a writer speak of ourselves, our dark, untamed and hurting selves. This, we don’t want to hear.

And maybe I don’t want to hear it either, because I only understand the vocabulary and not the meaning. The words are all familiar and I sound them out in my head and I know later, maybe when falling asleep, they’ll come together and weave a kind of sense and only then will I really know what he was saying. But I realize tonight I have a huge capacity to just sit and listen to the Arabic language. I even stop trying to understand and just listen to its music. Someone told me they thought the Arabic language sounded violent and menacing and that just hearing it made her afraid. But for me, it just lulls.

Or maybe that’s just words that lull, that soothe and rock. Because next door Tariq Ali is reading from A Sultan in Palermo, the fourth in his Islam Quintet, and beside him Fred Reed, the presenter, seems to be falling asleep. His closed eyes are settled deep and his head moves in tiny waves back and forth, back and forth. Tariq Ali is a big man, big in the Arabic sense: kibir. Kibir as in grand, wise, important. He is lovely, his London accent is lovely, and his book seems lovely. Is his Islam Quintet a counterpoint nod to Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet? I don’t know. I read Durrell while living in Alexandria years ago and it had nothing to do with the city as I saw it. Durrell was all big ideas and Alexandria is all small confusions. Blue Met, however, has both: big ideas and small confusions.

keep smiling, i'm just breaking your knees

I’ve been to Syria only once and what I discovered was this: no one talks. They move their lips and you hear about the latest fashions from Europe or the goings-on of the next-door neighbour. But try to engage someone in a conversation about politics, religion or sex, and the talking stops. They look around cautiously. Then: Great weather we’re having.

That’s the environment Zakaria Tamer draws from. Considered one of the most important writers in Arabic today, he has written numerous children’s books, two collections of satirical articles, and eleven collections of short stories. In Montreal this year for Blue Metropolis, he will be awarded the annual Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Prize during the festival.

In Breaking Knees, only the second of his collections to be translated into English, Tamer writes in short one- or two-page bursts, as if rushing to get it out before being caught. The stories, fables of discontent, hypocrisy and corruption, reveal a malaise at the core of Arab society. Sex runs rampant through Breaking Knees, but less as an expression of love and more as a fearful disorder. Sex manipulates, tarnishes and destroys. Men crumble and commit horrific acts for the want of it, while women lose their honour and perish for being associated with it.

And while the bedroom is no sanctuary, the street is even less of one. It vibrates with repressions that feed greedily upon each other. The man who beats his wife with impunity will find himself at the end of a policeman’s baton, who in turn will lose his job because of a malicious rumour begun by a rival officer, who himself will be condemned by a cleric for his lax piety. And the cleric will turn around and rape the woman he judges amoral.

Writing in a genre that he made popular, the “very, very short story” (al-qissa al-qissa jiddan) Tamer mixes satire, fantasy, humour and the occasional dash of searing realism. In one of the shorter and more pared-down stories, an old woman goes to a park to see the statue of the man responsible for killing her sons and husband. But the statue, “his right hand raised in a gesture that inspired awe and respect,” makes her feel small. She continues to shrink until she and everything around her also shrinks and disappears. Nothing is left but the statue, and the birds “whose pleasure it was to crap on it.”

An Arab critic once compared Tamer with Charles Darwin: one showed how monkeys developed into humans; the other showed how humans could be manipulated into becoming monkeys. Exiled in London since 1980, Zakaria Tamer is like the Arab world’s sad organ grinder. He plays his melancholy songs while the monkey stupidly dances, the crowd laughs, a man beats his wife, the police walk around collecting bribes, and a cleric breaks knees.

(Photo credit)