Monthly Archives: September 2016

2:2 The Sense of a Home

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Home. What a strange word when you say it over and over. Not longingly but with enough emphasis to draw out the sounds. It’s like a meditation, a prayer. Hooome. Hohm. Holy syntax. The combination of heaven and Om melding east and west. A convergence point. And then there’s all the sentiment and the resistance. Perhaps Ohm’s law was more about the voltage and currents that writhe through anybody’s home, and the personal resistances we put up to manage them–our constants. All of this reflection on home keeps me from the point here. My home was being taken from me.

Apparently my mortgage fell into the sub-prime category. I felt a sort of admiration for the act both my banker and that past-her-prime real estate agent gave about Home Is Where the Heart Is and Your First Big Steps. All that jittery happy-go-lucky sappy stuff that anyone could see through but really did get caught up with when the reality of owning your own home was materializing behind every cringe-worthy axiom and proverb.

You see when you’re twenty eight and making decent money painting pictures of the landscape you grew up in you don’t really have a concept of finances as much as survival and good and bad feelings. And my agent and banker were probably not smart enough to predict that sub-prime mortgages were anything but money-making, internal jargon. In fact, we were all quite sincere about the whole thing as I explored the house, signed the papers, and took the keys in my hand. The whole journey towards owning a home was a blur of naive perspectives, the banker’s, the agent’s, the buyer’s, set to motion by powers far beyond our small worlds of conception. It was like a Cubist painting.

First of all, she grew to hate it. Where I saw the backyard of my childhood, she discovered a whole plethora of weed species novel to her. Where she could only laugh at the bathtubs, furniture, and fireplace, I found a nostalgic comfort. Of course she hadn’t really known she hated the place till she lived in it. We would walk together down the street to the market and she’d look into other people’s houses. She’d always done this before, and I’d found it charming. It seemed to be a desire for that word again, for home. I infused her gaze with a sense of longing. She was merely obsessed with film, studying the active home life and its set for her next project or commercial. Of course I knew this, but it was too superficial for deep old me and my “drab paintings of lifeless, dark trees … Why don’t you paint a girl dancing, or a boy if that’s more your music?”

We danced plenty in my home. It could only be mine as her movements through our dances and domestic life confirmed the temporal status of the space in her mind; she cleaved through wallpaper and threw herself at the chairs. She stabbed the table and broke light bulbs. It was a wonderful newfound clumsiness that she hadn’t possessed in the apartment. But still she gave me what she wanted to give me and we drank and we danced and we made things in my home. I still couldn’t shake the landscapes, and even tried to paint the backyard a few times while she took to listening to something hip in drastic decibel ranges.

These backyard paintings were warped by the music and my childhood flew further away as I looked at them. Of course my agent loved them for the change in direction and I got a few shows and sold almost every one. The domestic reclaimed and destroyed simultaneously. That was how he referred to the first painting, and similar themes announced my shows. They weren’t all the backyard, but they were all of destruction. She had won she teased me as she looked at the violence.

We continued on like this, winning and losing our dance routines and I fell in love with the idea of her and home. Whatever terminus she had in mine I could accept the now of it like her smile in the window as I sat in that unloved yard. It was loved as I’ve said, but not for its own good. The same could be said of the sub-prime mortgages.

I walked out of the court quite alone after it was done. She hadn’t returned from South America on the day she said she would. I drove up to the house and stood outside for a moment looking at the building and remembering as much as I could till I opened the door and walked in.

 

1:5 Creating in Space

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My version of the story of evil:

A group of children awoke on a spaceship travelling to an unknown destination. The children came out of a sort of coma, a stasis in which their age and faculties were preserved till the moment the spaceship had gone a certain distance.

There were no windows out into space. The children did not know where or why they were, only that they were awake and there was a shiny, metallic environment to explore. The children were old enough to speak and they all spoke the same language. They began to mentally map the spaceship and each other.

There were many children of all shapes, sizes, and colours. On the ship there were various stations that glowed a silvery yellow and made faint beeping sounds. At these stations the children found food, water, and a set of mechanisms which changed the qualities of whatever was shown on the screen above the station.

The children giggled as they ate, spoke, and played with the stations’ controls. Up to four children could sit at a station and contribute to the image on the screen. After pulling a specific lever the children discovered that the thing created would move, make sounds, and interact with other things that the children created. They even discovered that they could alter how the thing moved, sounded, and interacted with its environment.

Soon the children were busy at work creating. They created suns, planets, creatures, rivers, plants, and things we cannot describe with English. The children were delighted to find that creations were observable in the other stations; that they were all creating within the same universe.

After a certain period of time the stations all shut down uniformly. Ports opened in the walls of the spaceship and glowed with an ice blue and chimed with irresistible lullabies. Drawn to the cozy ports, the children soon all slept. The wake up call  repeated after a certain time and the children were soon busy at creating again.

After many cycles of creating and watching their creations destroy, procreate, and exist, the children began to wonder who could create the greatest thing in the universe. A competition ensued and every child submitted a great creation. There was no unanimous great creation and the children grew frustrated. Their universe began to rumble and tremble as the children continued to compete.

Eventually the children decided it was no use because they had no way of measuring the greatest creation. So, naturally, the children decided they needed criteria and another competition began: who could create the worst thing in the universe?

The children worked feverishly to create worse things than the next. They created horrible creatures, diseases, wars, heartbreaks and all other manner of things they sometimes understood. But still no child could create the absolute worst thing in their universe.

Soon though, the children noticed a child who sat at his station and simply watched the universe unfold. He never created anything or participated in the children’s competitions.

–“Why don’t you help us create things?” the children asked him.

–“Because I like to watch and think about your creations,” he replied.

–“Well, what do you think the worst thing is?” they asked, hoping to get his judgement.

–“The worst thing in all of creation would have to be…” he continued with a long and terrifying story.

After he was done a few children began to yell angrily at him that none of that should ever be created. Others began to cry. Most simply looked at him sullen and silent. Eventually they all agreed that that was the worst thing they’ve ever heard, but at least no one had created it.

–“We have now” he said.

The friend I told the story simply said “OK, but what happened after?” I don’t know I said. He’d been quite insistent on critiquing the feasibility of the whole spaceship thing so it was kind of difficult to tell a coherent version of the story, but I do think his last question is quite appropriate. The question touches on continuing after trauma and what could be more traumatic than the most evil, bad thing ever created (or imagined?) And then I thought maybe the best, or most good thing would then be existing after and in spite of such evil? And how do we do that? Likely by acknowledging, remembering, and learning from it with stories.

 

1:3: Oraliture vs. Literature (Why Fight?)

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Courtney MacNeil’s “orality” gave some light to a dim idea that’s been floating around my cranium: the difference between the spoken and the written in developing meaning. Personally attracted to the written (likely attributed to Occidental academia prescription), I’ve seemed to search for a power of one over the other, of the written over the spoken. This is where a lot of my conception of misunderstanding between “oral culture” and “written culture,” and I believe the setting of Chamberlin and MacNeil’s explorations rests. However, I’ll give myself some credit as I was specifically interested in everyday speech and how the space and time of physically speaking may simplify or at the least compress communication, yet still achieve comparable meaning to writing. My power struggle wasn’t so cultural.

MacNeil’s exposition exceeds my scope as orality quickly becomes an intrinsic part of modern communication no less substantial than the written word. MacNeil prudently notes the practical uses of orality being “knowledge-exchange and transmission within a community,” confirming my suspicions of orality’s efficacy in communication. The somewhat obvious wording resonated with Erika Paterson’s notions of the listener and the storyteller being “connected to a time and a place” fostering environments where “stories absorb their moment of telling, the space they are told, and the listener’s response.” Connection creates memorability, and memorability creates lasting knowledge or information. Beyond speaking aloud is connecting (an audible groan at the cliche connecting) with an audience, with a community to create collective memory triggers.

Orality then can shed the Western “valuable-ness” comparison to written communication with works such as Chamberlin’s and MacNeil’s as they prove, despite their own medium, that orality is inescapable. MacNeil points to Western Spoken Word poets and recorded sound bites as simple examples of the Toronto School’s definition being problematic. The binary of oral culture and written culture disintegrates quite quickly, especially with new media technologies. Deeper analysis of such technologies’ effects is likely available but my superficial suspicion is that this disintegration occurs in the dialogue that happens between the two Western conceptions of culture on blogs, television, radio; dialogue that shifts between written, visual, and oral communication at ease and at a rapid pace.

A possible connection to the oral culture vs. written culture debate might be found in the development of a high modernist canon in poetry. The new critics, and the generally anthologized modern poets, all pointed towards the poem as a work of art immune to time, place, and society. The lofty idealism echoes the rationale of colonialism’s righteousness, as if one preconception of culture could be the best and most timeless. The elevation of high modernist poetry came with the silencing of other poets of the modern era, often poets connected with social and political issues which they addressed in their work, experimenting with form or directly with content. And most easily connectable is the praising of the written word as some kind of immune, ultimate, and aesthetic form. Cary Nelson has been a constant proponent of giving a voice to the unconsidered, and his latest Modern American Anthology looks to diversity to find “searing statements” that are “found perhaps nowhere else in our literature—perhaps nowhere else in our culture” (XXXIII).

Work Cited:

Nelson, Cary, editor. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2015.

MacNeil, Courtney. “orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory,  https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/ Accessed 20 Sep. 2016.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres Sept 2016. https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-1/lesson-12/. Accessed 20 Sep. 2016

 

elementary prejudice

Running Late to My Elementary Prejudices

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Hullo English 470.

I’m Michael and I’m running quite late on the ball here, but I’m registered and ready to go now! Where’d that exclamation mark come from? I think I’m catching a bit of our professor’s enthusiasm.

I’m impressed with the well-organized site and the active Facebook page and hope I can catch up with everyone else.

The course’s topic attracts me because of first-hand experience as well as general interest in marginalization and justice or the lack-thereof. Where storytelling intersects, or perhaps underlies every aspect of Canadian life intrigues me. And even deeper, the concept of “being Canadian” seems a less than cohesive ideal.  I hope to learn.

The personal bend comes with some of my earliest learning in elementary school alongside numerous first nation peers. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation ran buses up Dollarton Highway to the school. Despite best intentions and often friendly interactions a tribalism eventually emerged and divided us. The earlier grades were friendly and innocent and without any sort of prejudice, but as we aged and sought out ways to define what “I,” “we,” and “them” meant, walls were slowly raised.

However there was no real animosity between groups, and factions of English students, French students, and First Nation students were established as zones of belonging. It was a sinister simplicity that eased us into unintended prejudices. Games, soccer, football, basketball, would be played out between factions, Natives vs. French, English vs. French, etc. Eerily reminiscent of early colonialism, I begin to feel an uneasiness that I can’t quite hold and face thinking back on those years.

I would guess that the institutionalized divides of reserve and suburb, English class and French class, assisted learning and not, helped the elementary factions thrive, but these were the forms we used to justify our mythologies of identity in so malleable a time of youth.

I am hoping that this class will give me a deeper insight into the forming of the prejudices I’ve participated in, and likely still participate in, so that I can find ways to be more aware and responsible.

As well as the societal, I’d like to learn the literary, taking into account the various techniques and stories that have helped shape and will continue to help shape our Canadian identities.

Or do we just like beer?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z9d1sk3N-M

Work Cited:

Lime, Stuart. School Primary School East Kilbrade South Park. 14 Jun. 2014. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/en/school-primary-school-east-kilbride-1048983/ Accessed 19 Sep. 2016

“Tsleil-Waututh Nation.” Tsleil-Waututh Nation. http://www.twnation.ca/ Accessed 19 Sep. 2016

Molson Canadian. “Global Beer Fridge (Extended) | Molson Canadian.” YouTube. YouTube, 25 June 2015. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.