Author Archives: MichaelPendreigh

3:7 Hyperlinking GGRW

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I’ve chosen pages 251-260 for my hyperlinking journey. Come with me through the links.

Blossom Lodge (251): Jane Flick connects Blossom, Alberta, the location of the lodge, with a story of King’s that features it as well, One Good Story, That One, as well as with a 1947 W.O Mitchell novel, Who Has Seen the Wind? (147). Like King’s book, Mitchell’s is broken up into four parts (McClay). The first blossom that comes to mind is a cherry blossom, and with a usual 5 leaves, perhaps King’s suggestion with Blossom, Alberta is that the story will continue after this story has been told, an always-present fifth part. Flick recognizes “natural beauty and regeneration, as well as the smallness of the town” in the name which also relies on the real-world blossom (147).

The lodge then is a way to visit Blossom. Most characters pass through the lodge before interacting with other characters or the town. Dr Hovaugh, Alberta, Charlie and others all make a stay at Blossom. The place is “lodged” between characters and the town/reserve/damn.

C.B. Cologne (251): Flick offers the spanish name of Christopher Columbus “Cristóbal Colón” (153). She also observes the pun on the kind of perfume as well as similarity to the director’s name, Cecil B. Demille (153). In the story, C.B. is an Italian that played Indian leads in the Western films Charlie’s father often competed for.

C.B. Cologne then represents a sort of pervasive European odour throughout representations of Native Americans. Christopher Columbus being the originator, and the C.B. Cologne the Italian being the sort of apex of the appropriation of Native American culture as he seems more fitting for the roles than real Native Americans.

Polly Hantos (251): Flick sees the direct resemblance to “Pocohontas” in this figure’s name. She is a character that is “waiting in the shadows of the major studios, working as extras, fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again” (182). The loose adaption of the “Pocohontas” name shows how the Western aesthetic cares little about the authenticity of the original culture, only the recreation of easily digestible forms. The fact that Charlie struggles to recognize the figure referred to on this page, first comparing them to Cologne and then to Hantos, suggests that the marginalization of these parts is so severe that gender doesn’t even determine them from one another.

Barry Zanos (252): Jane Flick compares this name to Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian navigator and explorer who first sighted what is now New York (157). An interesting sonic quality of this name is also the possible “Bury Za Nose” or “Bury The Nose.” This could refer to Charlie’s father’s inability to get a role because of his nose and Barry Zanos position as a foil to him.

Sally Jo Weha (252): Consulting Flick first, this name resembles Sacajawea or “Bird Woman” or “Boat Woman,” a Shoshone woman “guide for Lewis and Clark” (157). As Charlie continues to search for the identity of the person he’s looking at he runs through the numerous characters that kept him and his father company in Hollywood. As a guide for two white men, Sacajawea represents another crossing point between Western and First Native culture that Charlie is attempting to navigate.

Johnny Cabot (252): Again Flick offers a useful reference to John Cabot or Giovanni Caboto the Italian who was credited with discovering “Canada and the mainland of North America” (157). It’s interesting that the showfolk that Charlie runs through are subtle references to European explorers, yet the Italian of the novel, C.B. Cologne refers to a spaniard while Cabot could have served nicely. I believe King is working with ambigious identities just as Charlie is working to resolve these identities. Charlie is exploring his past as he stares at the present incarnation of First Native past, one of the Four Indians.

Uncle Wally (252): Uncle Wally was a travelling salesman that appeared on Sesame Street from 1984 to 1992. He occassionally told “tall tales” and was one of the first adult believers of Big Bird’s Snuffleupagus (Muppet Wiki). Possibly a connection between children’s entertainment and the Four Indian’s “tall tales” or creation stories and their willingness to believe each other’s creation stories.

Uncle Wally may also refer to Wally Amos, founder of Famous Amos Chocalate Chip Cookies, which connects the offhand reference to Alberta’s father, “Amos” as well (King 255). Wally Amos’ cookie company eventually ran out out of business during the 80s. In this business figure light, Wally may represent Charlie’s disenfranchisement with corporate law as he feels out the hollowness of his relationships while returning to Blossom.

Amos (255): Amos was one of the Twelve Minor Prophets, figures present in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy text. A proponent of all men being equal under God, King’s naming of Amos as Alberta’s drunk father that left his family offers a negative realism to the religious figure’s belief. Amos the father represents the failure or absence of Amos the prophet’s teachings.

Duplessis (260): Maruice Duplessis served as premier of Quebec from 1936-39 and 1944-59. He’s often “referred to as le grande noirceur (the great darkness).” His actions contributed to the creation of “the first civil liberties groups in the country” (Canada’s Human Rights History). One such action was the transferring of orphans to psychiatric hospitals to secure more federal funding as it was more generous for hospitals rather than orphanages.

King chose a great villanous Canadian for the name of his foreboding, dam-building corporation. Along with the reference to the figure above, the name sounds like “duplicity,” a term easily attributed to government affairs with Natives and ceded or treatied land.

Work Cited:

“Amos, Wally 1937.” Contemporary Black Biography. Encyclopedia.com. 29 Nov. 2016

“Duplessis, Maurice 1890.” Canada’s Human Rights History. 29 Nov. 2016

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature  161-162. (1999). Web. Nov 15/2016.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

McClay, Catherine. “Biocritical Essay.” The W.O. Mitchell Papers. 29 Nov. 2016

“Uncle Wally.” Muppet Wiki. 29 Nov. 2016.

3:5 Placing Four Indians

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Q: Narratives assume, in Blanca Chester’s words, “a common matrix of cultural knowledge.” The Four Old Indians are perhaps the best examples of characters that belong to a matrix of cultural knowledge, which excludes many non-First Nations. What were your first questions about and impressions of these characters? How have you come to understand their place in the novel.

I believe the Four Indians of Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water exist as the mythological, literary, and cultural boundary between First Nations’ and Western people’s traditions. The four figures carry the names of well-known Western “heroes:” Hawkeye, referring to a white frontier hero who knew “Indian ways” that appeared in television, film, and novels; Lone Ranger, connecting the Indian to the popular western hero; Robinson Crusoe, the economical protagonist that “writes lists” of Daniel Defoe’s castaway novel, sometimes known as the first English novel; and Ishmael, the survivor of Melville’s Moby Dick who lives by “staying afloat on Queequg’s coffin” (King 293, Jane Flick 141-2). The characters Western names span the English literary tradition from Crusoe to Ishmael to Hawkeye to Lone Ranger, each offering a way to understand the Western protagonist.

These Western protagonist archetypes often come into conflict with the natives whether it be Crusoe “adopting” Friday as his servant, Ishmael coming to terms with and befriending the cannibal Queequg, Hawkeye mimicking “Indian ways,” or the Lone Ranger being a survivor of an Indian raid and by definition of his existence in opposition to them.  King dons his Four Indians with these rich literary backgrounds through the simple act of naming, demonstrating the power of preconceptions, a power he likely hopes to reign in with his book. What surprises the reader is the Four Indians’ resistance to any kind of identity, including their name.

“Ms. Jones said that the Indians are women” replies a confused Cereno when he hears Dr Hovaugh describe them as men (King 75). King creates resistance to identity through gender ambiguity in this simple example, but throughout the pages of GGRW the Four Indians are constantly in flux, appearing within movies, within narratives, and within the creation story narrative that seemingly exists within and without the “real world” narratives. The Four Indians weave the creation stories of GGRW while also being a physical part of the world they’re creating. Their physical presence is subject to physical constraints and its not. One is reminded of “Not ants, but ants” when thinking of the Four Indians as they escape the hospital, gender, and their own names (Chamberlin 133).

On the First Nations side we might find the Four Indians referring to the Four Indian Kings. These kings were Iroquois chieftains that visited London on request of Queen Anne and “even saw a Shakespearean play (MacBeth) at the Haymarket Theatre (Sypniewska para 3 ). These kings or chiefs held official power in their own communities and had celebrity power in Western England. They were painted by Jan Verelst and sent homewards with Christian missionaries and a new fort and chapel commissioned by the Queen.

The Four Indians exist at the limit of the divide between Western and First Nation culture, offering either side a way to perceive the other. King cleverly includes the reader on this perception opportunity with his literary naming and contortion of preconceptions. Sergeant Cereno, Dr Hovaugh, Lionel, and others all are exposed to the conundrum of the Four Indians as they cannot quite make sense of their identities, purposes, or relation to them respectively. While peering at the Four Indians the characters of GGRW must come to terms with themselves. The Four Indians gift Lionel with a leather jacket that fulfills his fantasy of looking “like John Wayne” (King 318). Like Lionel, King lulls his characters and readers into a false sense of cultural knowledge with his Four Indians and then reverts it with their perplexing identities and actions, offering his characters and readers a way to think about both cultures simultaneously.

Work Cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground.  Vintage Canada, 2004.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature  161-162. (1999). Web. Nov 15/2016.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Sypniewska, Margaret Knight. “The Four Indian Kings.” Indigenous Americans Their Genealogy    History and Heraldry. Web. Nov 15/2016.

3:1 Frye’s Literary Blinders

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Question: For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above?

In The Bush Garden, Frye’s literary system helps us understand his overlooking of Scott’s actual dealings with the indigenous peoples of Canada’s culture: “The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (234). Literature existed in and of itself for Northrop Frye, dividing cultural writing into the literary and non-literary. It is unsurprising that Frye references the works of Proust and Eliot as classics of literary experimentation because of their positions on the high-modernist pantheon, driven by the New Critics who championed the belief that the work of literature contained its art in itself and the conditions around its production were irrelevant (234). Even more telling is the ethnicity of Proust, French, and Eliot, English which tie in nicely with Daniel Coleman’s “White Civility.” Only speculating, I can already see how a filter could be built by Frye on the foundations of a Western literary tradition that appropriates mythologies (Greek & Roman) while simultaneously distancing itself from ideas of historical, social, and political conditions. Such ignorance of conditions, combined with implicit ethnic literary superiority, can explain Frye’s dismissal of Duncan Campbell Scott’s actual or “non-literary” dealings with First Nations people.

Frye reinforces the idea of appropriating mythologies himself: “We have been shown how the Indians began with a mythology which included all the main elements of our own. It was, of course, impossible for Canadians to establish any real continuity with it” (235). Canadians here, notably distinct from the Indians, cannot use the First Nations’ mythologies for the production of literature. Frye raises up a grammatical divide between Canadians and Indians and decides that the latter offered only impossibility “for” the former. Such impossibility defined Scott’s own interactions with First Nations people, noted by D.M.R. Bentley as his “repeated poetic engagement with Native cultures” haunted by “his fear of their potential to compromise and disrupt the culture of which he was a part and an exponent” (767). In the autonomous sphere of literature, the myths Scott appropriated for his own poetics allowed him creativity. But when the actual people who created these myths must be considered, Scott has to confront fear of losing his sense of civilization, his sense of White civility.

In the realm of literature, Frye has no quarrel with Scott engaging with the mythologies of the indigenous people as in a sealed form they were merely a part of the content, a part of the setting from which the writer draws experience (Frye 234). For Frye, good literature wasn’t about setting: “it would be an obvious fallacy to claim that the setting provided anything more than novelty” (234). Furthering the literary usefulness of Indians, Frye continues: “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions,” demonstrating how the self-sealed literary realm could, in a crude way, play with the Indians while never having to consider their real, non-literary presence (235).

Michael Asch uses the terms “imaginary” and “mythological” to comment on the same effect Frye observes in Canadian literature: “[Canada was] an imaginary world occupied before our arrival by mythological creatures who, though human in many respects, were not yet sufficiently advanced to have constituted political society” (33). Asch seeks to point out how such a perspective was dismissive, but I believe Scott’s literary representations, when confronted by his policy-making decisions, confirm the perspective as true. Canlit defines the ideology of White civility, the ideology behind Scott’s poetry as: “Settler-colonial” culture which is “built on justifying racism and colonialism while, at the same time, denying its existence and legacy.” Frye’s ignorance of Scott’s active destruction of indigenous culture can be seen as stemming from his isolated literary model where the indigenous people and their culture are merely “novelties” to be used for literary motives while their non-literary actualities are to be denied.

Frye’s conviction that there has never been a great piece of Canadian literature on the one hand is depressing as it shows how indigenous culture couldn’t even be used for literary greatness, yet on the other gives evidence that such appropriation “for” Canadians will never create great literature.

Work Cited:

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy       Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

Bentley, D. M. R. “Shadows In The Soul: Racial Haunting In The Poetry Of Duncan Campbell Scott.” University Of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal Of The Humanities 75.2 (2006): 752-770. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

CanLit Guides. “Reading and Writing in Canada, A Classroom Guide to Nationalism.” Canadian Literature. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

 

2:6 Where Are Sue’s “Indians?”

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Question:

Read Susanna Moodie’s introduction to the third edition of Roughing it in the Bush, 1854. I use the Project Gutenburg website which has a ‘command F’ function that allows you to search the entire document by words or phrases. Moodie’s introduction is often read as a warning to would be emigrants as well as an explanation of why her family emigrated from Britain. See if you can find echoes of the stories discussed above: a gift from god, a second Garden of Eden, an empty/wasted land, the noble but vanishing Indian, and the magical map. By echoes I mean reading between the lines or explicitly within Moodie’s introduction. Discussing what you discover, use your examples as evidence to write a blog that explores what you think might have been Moodie’s level of awareness of the stories she carried with her. And accordingly, the stories that she “resurrects’ by her appearance in the Dead Dog CafŽ in Green Grass Running Water.

A:

Within Moodie’s introduction there is a definite conflict between the reality and the idealism of the emigrant narrative. Undoubtedly though, Moodie believes that the emigrant who works hard and under the lord’s guidance will prosper from the land: “The Great Father of the souls and bodies of men knows the arm which wholesome labour from infancy has made strong, the nerves which have become iron by patient endurance, by exposure to weather, coarse fare, and rude shelter.” These “souls and bodies” with iron patience will be god’s chosen. What will they receive for their labour? A gift: all emigrants who leave for Canada believe, in Moodie’s eyes, an inspiring narrative: “they go forth to make for themselves a new name and to find another country, to forget the past and to live in the future, to exult in the prospect of their children being free and the land of their adoption great” (Moodie).

Here we find the gift of god promised in the new settlement: a place with a history for the settlers to write. The stark lack of any Native inhabitants concerns or even interactions in Moodie’s introduction is also represented by the term “the land of their adoption” as the need for parenting is established. Emigrants receive Canada to raise up from a ground zero, reminding us of the “Chapter 1” that colonizers begin at, and the “Chapter 15” of the Natives they neglect in the process of “receiving” and cultivating their adopted land (Asch 31). Moodie’s emigrant is gifted a new beginning, a biblical rebirth, while the Natives, perhaps, see the rising tides of doom.

This gift from god is the garden of Eden with its “salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country.” The caveat for Moodie, seen earlier, is that only those chosen by god and endowed with iron patience will make this garden an actuality and “reclaim the waste places of the earth,” again commenting on the Natives’ usage of the land while keeping them out of the text. The wasted land of Canada require iron men who will “hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization,” driving further the implication that any previous inhabitants of the land are uncivilized. Implicit also in this advance is that Moodie’s civilization is the one and only civilization, she does not say “the advance of our civilization” or “English/European civilization.”

The most striking statement of the introduction comes early as Moodie relates the emigrant’s task to an “act of severe duty.” Not only is the land a gift, it is a gift that must be accepted and capitalized on. The necessity of this statement could even be said to emphasis the active European vs. passive/wasteful/invisible Native relationship that we can see in this very short introduction. The absence of any direct address to the Native people invokes the vanishing and noble Native narrative prompted in the question above; the land receives both glorified, holy applause and realistic brutality, the land symbolizing, perhaps quite consciously, the noble Native who needed to be reined in by civilization. The flowery language of the narrative Moodie finds to be a failure is paralleled by the realism of the empty and wasted: “what a mass of misery, and of misrepresentation productive of that misery, have ye not to answer for! You had your acres to sell.”  Taking the idealized land as the symbol of the noble Native, Moodie, reasoned on experience (“nineteen years in the colony”), addresses both the literal landsellers, likely European, but also the noble Natives who squandered their gifts and never became “productive.”

Moodie, while sardonically describing the lofty language of the romanticized emigrant, reinforces the narrative of the Europeans active responsibility to bring civilization and productivity to the land. They must fulfill this narrative because they themselves come from productive civilization and any land not yet under the “influence of the wise and revered institutions of their native land” must consequentially be theirs. 

King’s Susanna Moodie searches for Indians. From Moodie’s introduction alone we can see why she can’t find them in Green Grass, Running Water: she’s written them out of the conversation. She remarks that “we’re all Canadians” in King’s story, yet she’s on an adventure to find “Indians.” people surely present in her nation (158). King perceptively sees that the Canadian emigrant narrative neglects to give the Native people: an active role or even a voice.

Work Cited:

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. 1993. Rpt. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush.. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 21 Apr 2016.

 

2:4 Twins in This Canadian Land

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Question:

“If Europeans were not from the land of the dead, or the sky, alternative explanations which were consistent with indigenous cosmologies quickly developed” (“First Contact”43). Robinson gives us one of those alternative explanations in his stories about how Coyote’s twin brother stole the “written document” and when he denied stealing the paper, he was “banished to a distant land across a large body of water” (9). We are going to return to this story, but for now – what is your first response to this story? In context with our course theme of investigating intersections where story and literature meet, what do you make of this stolen piece of paper? This is an open-ended question and you should feel free to explore your first thoughts.

Harry Robinson was told the Coyote twin story as an explanation for Aboriginal ownership of the land they had lived on and remembered living on, an explanation that may seem absurd to both Western and Aboriginal parties, but for different reasons. The stark truth that Aboriginal ownership is often pushed from consideration, that the “Indians belonged to the land,” creates a necessity for these ownership stories (Robinson, “Living by Stories” 9). However, Aboriginal conventions of establishing such ownership through stories and traditions did not match Western legal ownership concepts. J. Edward Chamberlin showed us earlier how such cultural divides in perception subvert, from one’s own culture, valid ownership claims, recalling the judge dismissing the First Nation’s woman’s “ada’ox” (“If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?” 20).

It’s fascinating how ownership establishes itself differently, yet remains, with a lot of reduction here, about living on and off of a particular piece of geographical land. The necessity for stories complements the necessity for laws across the cultures, perhaps clarifying how our myths of structure rule similarly anywhere.

This similarity is initially seen in the unifying aspect of Harry’s (the storyteller’s) two characters being twins, binding the two figures with the sacredness of kinship. A blood bond exists between twins, Here the storyteller highlights the common humanity that persists (but so often in silence) during first contact. It is also a moment of humility as both twin’s perceptions originate simultaneously with their tasks for creating the world. The younger twin, the thief, can be dismissed as evil or can be accepted as a part of all heritage as even the Aboriginals feuded and stole lands. This initial unity, I think, may be the most powerful moral message taken from the short, summarized version of the story.

The particulars of the story’s manifestation as a way to claim ownership for the Coyote’s descendants, the ones who followed the proper ordering of the world counteracts the previous humility–there is pride in being a Coyote. The pride too isn’t something to shy away from, it’s necessary, and is reflected just as easily in the “proper way of things” that Western ideology brought to North America. The written document reeks of the bible too, and in its stealing seems to comment on both the ability for a story to be misinterpreted or warped as well as the desire for people to make a story their own, to steal it. The written document, the “paper,” presumably was a part of the instructions for the “creation of the earth and its first inhabitants,” mirroring the testaments of European religion (Robinson, “Living Stories” 9).

The way out of conflict, the storyteller offers, was a book of codes detailing “the law from the time we finish” (10). The statement quoted shows that the tasks the twins were initially given were still unfinished. This gives the story a sense of an inevitable end, but also a future. Intriguingly, the two twins meet at the written, signalling some kind of forgiveness for the original sin from Coyote as well as a desperation, once again showing the duality of existence; of forgiving and needing help simultaneously.

The implications of this short story fire off in every direction: we all descend from the same family, but have our own stories and interpretations, that “Black and White” can unite on rules (interestingly in a written code), that oral and written come from the same “series of important tasks,” and many more (9-10).

My question going forward is simply what happened to the younger twin? What is the importance of Coyote requesting a law from the king?

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2:3 Home As a Verb

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After reading various home stories from my intriguing classmates (available here), here is the list of things I noticed:

Departure: the act of leaving home was almost always present in these stories. The fluidity of the term home perhaps starts here as one place or thing that can be left for another home. Simultaneous senses of home can exist together but one must always physically or mentally be in one idea when referring to it as home.

Destination: home was a place to arrive at, or to aspire for in many stories. It seemed to exist as an ideal, but an ideal that was loosely defined, existing at the limits of language, between the tangible and the imagined.

People: one would be hard pressed to find a home story that does not describe the people associated with that home, or perhaps necessary for that physical place to attain the term home; mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, support groups, movements, seem to all be worthy of being a home.

Animals/Nature: whether the actual environment or a horse one lives above , home came beside descriptions of living non-human creatures and landscapes. Home takes up both the transient living environment and the permanent, once again existing at a tension as in home being the place you leave and the place you arrive at. Emotions attached themselves to nature and then through those images of nature emotions became a part of the physical place.

Identity: home helps us understand who we are. Place helps us see what we are in relationship to it as Kaylie points out: 

It is the connection to this place—watching the waves role in and out with my breath—and the recognition of the connections between the living beings here, and between this life and this place. It is recognizing how I fit into this picture.

Home as a means for identity both hurt and bolstered many storytellers. Home put down constraints as a place where one was meant to feel safe, but if this meaning failed one was left disoriented. These constraints such as relationships, physical place, and other social identifiers could help though, giving people a sense of grounding.

Ineffable: The language of home seems to fail at its origin because it exists as a place one leaves and a place one returns to, as both the people and nature that inhabit it, as the identity one sheds and the identity one embraces. Home comes with contradiction. Storytellers reflected on childhood homes, some happy, some not, but those homes seemed to belong in childhood, and now there was a space to be filled by a different home. Home then changes but also grounds us.

What I’ve been trying to get at, but perhaps not well enough, through this list is that home is our “Believe it and not” challenge that J. Edward Chamberlin presents early on in his struggle with how to make sense of the word home when its definition contradicts between almost every individual (34). The term comes from  Paul Veyne’s response to the question of whether the ancient Greeks actually believed their myths or not, but it is equally applicable to our conceptions of home. We both believe in it as a destination and a place we are in right now.

Finally, the act of believing implicitly attaches itself to home with every  individualized conception of the word. To simply utter “home” becomes an action of the imagination, throwing us forward and backwards in time, urging us to analyze our current home, and escaping our tongues as we try to define what home means as we approach it, like the limits of Calculus.

Work Cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada Ed., Vintage Canada, 2004.

Fish, Colleen. “Many Assumptions and Values Are the Same but Details Differ Greatly! – Ass #2.3.” ENGL 470 – Canadian Studies. N.p., 30 Sept. 2016. Web. 04 Oct. 2016.
Higgs, Kaylie. “Is This Home?” Creating Connections. N.p., 27 Sept. 2016. Web. 04 Oct. 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.