From Word To Word

One of the hazards in being an English literature teacher and a reader and a writer, of being self-professedly a person interested in words and language, is that I am constantly having people ask me to edit their work, everything from resumes to entire novels.  This sometimes makes for quite interesting reading (like the novels of my friend John) and sometimes quite tedious reading (like the paper in business administration that I recently edited for a former student), but more and more frequently, it seems, it makes for very awkward reading, because so much of what comes across my desk now fails entirely to account for its audience.

Now, I am not claiming that this inability to write for an audience is a recent development, that writers are worse at writing to an audience now than they have been historically, though I really do suspect that this is the case.  I am merely observing that, at this point in time at least, much of the writing that I edit is written without any consideration at all for the sort of people who will be reading it or for the social roles that those people occupy.  I get essays that ignore any kind of academic formating, use the grossest slang and colloquialism, and appeal to ridiculously popular sources to support their arguments.  I get resumes that offer deeply personal information and that read like a twitter feed.  I get children’s stories that use vocabulary and sentence structure far above the ability of any children that I have ever encountered.  I get poetry so self-involved that it is meaningless to anyone but its author.  In short, I get writing that has no idea of what its audience might want, need, expect, or understand.

Even more troublesome, when I critique writing on this basis, these writers are almost always resistant to changing their work to accommodate their readers, and they do so more or less explicitly on the basis that it is the audience who should accommodate the author.  The assumption is that a failure in communication is always a failure on the part of the reader, never on the part of the writer, that the audience should just accept what the author writes and be happy with it, and it is very difficult to convince these writers that most readers will not actually be happy with it, that their professors will just give a poor grade, that their employers will merely throw away their resumes, that children will not be interested in their stories, and that readers will make polite conversation about their poetry and then promptly forget that it ever existed.

The fact is, however cliche it might be to say so, that as long as a piece of writing has any audience at all beyond its author, so long as it is intended to achieve any kind of effective communication, whether it be informational, persuasive, or artistic, the onus is on the author to write in ways that the audience can understand, to adhere to the conventions insofar as they are useful and necessary, to choose a tone and style that will be appealing and comprehensible, to include information that is accurate and persuasive, to maintain the appropriate distance between the author and the audience.  An author is by no means compelled to do this, of course, and may willfully choose to do otherwise for one reason or another, even at times for artistic effect, but let there be no question as to where the fault lies when the audience is confused, offended, or otherwise uninterested in reading what has been addressed to it.

I wrote a post about Manitoulin Island a few years ago, mentioning how I had been picking sandcherries and making syrup with them.  Since then I have made several attempts to grow some sandcherries from seed, with almost no success. One batch of seeds, which I cleaned individually as I ate the cherries, were mistakenly left in the zipper pocket of my swimsuit and put through both the washer and the dryer, so I did not even bother stratifying them.  Another batch, also individually cleaned, went through both stratification and planting, but not a single seed germinated.  I tried to find other people who had successfully germinated them, but without success, so I was forced to work by trial and error.

When seeds do not germinate, there are several possible explanations.  First, the seeds may not be viable, which may be caused by the seeds being harvested too soon; by the parent plant not being properly pollinated; by exposure to environmental factors, like growing too near a juglone producing plant; or by some idiot sending them through the laundry.  Second, the seeds may not be stratified properly, which is to say that they may not have been exposed to the proper cycles of cold and heat that are required for the seed to trigger germination.  Third, they may not have undergone the right environmental factors to break down the seed shell, a process that might involve sitting in moisture for a certain time, going through the digestive system of a certain animal, or even, in some cases, being exposed to forest fire.  These environmental factors can often be approximated, by subjecting the seeds to acids or scarification or heat, but determining which techniques to use is not always easy.

Now, I was pretty sure that at least some of the seeds were viable, because I had taken them from a number of plants in a number of locations, all of which showed seedling growth in subsequent years, and because I was collecting seeds at various stages of maturity, all the way from relatively young fruit to the fruit that had ripened fully and fallen to the ground.  I was also pretty certain that I had stratified them correctly, since I have stratified other varieties of cherries very successfully, and it would be strange for such a similar species to require a double-stratification or something of that nature.  I was left with the probability that the seeds needed additional environmental factors to germinate, and I could count out fire fairly safely.  The plants do, however, grow right on the beach, so it was entirely possible that they needed to be soaked for a good period of time, and many kinds of seeds need to pass through an animal’s digestive system, so I determined to watch carefully this past summer, to see how the seeds were being spread naturally.

My first discovery was that a tremendous number of the cherries were being consumed by the gulls.  The gull droppings were full of seeds, and I was mentally preparing myself for the unpleasant task of digging through bird waste for them, when I made a second discovery, that the gulls often voided over the water, leaving the shallows full of partly digested but washed and soaking seeds.  I gathered several hundred of them, stratified them for four months in a soil mixture that was more sandy and moist than I normally use, and yesterday I planted them.  I have high hopes .

It was Malcolm Lowry, with his impossible, perfect sentence, that started me on this strange business of collecting long and masterful sentences in the first place, and now here is another from Lowry, and entirely against all my expectations, since I had been told that he wrote only the one novel, Under the Volcano, and so never suspected that I would read anything more of him until I discovered a collection of his stories, Hear Us O Lord From Thy Dwelling Place, in a used bookstore the other day.  I have not read very far in my new treasure, and I have already run across several examples of sentences that I could add to my collection, but I will only share one.  Let it be read in the spirit that I am sharing it, both in honour of Lowry’s role in creating this strange obsession of mine, and also in celebration of discovering more of his beautiful writing:

“Ah, its absolute loneliness amid those wastes, those wildernesses, of rough rainy seas bereft even of sea birds, between contrary winds, or in the great dead windless swell that comes following a gale; and then with the wind springing up and blowing the spray across the sea like rain, like a vision of creation, blowing the little boat as it climbed the highlands into the skies, from which sizzled cobalt lightnings, and then sank down into the abyss, but already was climbing again, while the whole sea crested with foam like lambs’ wool went furling off to leeward, the whole vast moon-driven expanse like the pastures and valleys and snow-capped ranges of a Sierra Madre in delirium, in ceaseless motion, rising and falling, and the little boat rising, and falling into a paralyzing sea of white drifting fire and smoking spume by which it seemed overwhelmed: and all this time a sound, like a high sound of singing, yet as sustained in harmony as telegraph wires, or like the unbelievably high perpetual sound of the wind where there is nobody to listen, which perhaps does not exist, or the ghost of the wind in the rigging of ships long lost, and perhaps it was the sound of the wind in its toy rigging, as again the boat slanted onward: but even then what further unfathomed deeps had it oversailed, until what birds of ill omen turned heavenly for it at last, what iron birds with saber wings skimming forever through the murk above the gray immeasurable swells, imparted mysteriously their own homing knowledge to it, the lonely buoyant little craft, nudging it with their beaks under golden sunsets in a blue sky, as it sailed close in to mountainous coasts of clouds with stars over them, or burning coasts at sunset once more, as it rounded not only the terrible spume-drenched rocks, like incinerators in sawmills, but other capes unknown, those twelve years, of giant pinnacles, images of barrenness and desolation, upon which the heart is thrown and impaled eternally.”

Our family has had a difficult last few months.  A few weeks before Christmas, we learned that we will not be able to adopt the baby girl we have been fostering, and though she will be going home to a good situation, we are all very saddened that she will not be a part of our family.  Then, just after Christmas, my wife’s grandfather passed away, expectedly, but still painfully, and our home was saddened once again. 

Because of these and other things, my wife and I have decided that our family needs to take a break from some of our activities so that we can have a chance to take care of each other and to recover ourselves a little.  So, at least for a few months, we will not be holding our Dinner and a Doc events.  Hopefully, at some point, we will resume them, or something like them, but for now we feel that it is best for us to have our attention on more important things.

We really appreciate all those who have attended the events over the years.  We have fond memories of sharing those times with you.  And, of course, if any of you need your documentary fix, feel free to drop by any time.

In The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard insists that for hospitality to remain hospitality it must give up every attempt to understand the other, every attempt to reduce the other’s foreignness.  We exist, he says, “not to be known or recognized,”  but “solely to be received and to receive,” and so we must “seek the other’s cruelty, the other’s intelligibility, the other as spectre; constrain the other to foreignnness; violate the other in his foreignness.”  The task of hospitality then is not to reduce the other’s foreigness through understanding, but to maintain the other’s foreignness, to receive the other precisely as the entirely foreign, apart from any knowledge. 

Yet, I wonder how this hospitality of pure reception might actually appear in the world, since every reception of the other, even the purest reception of the other as entirely and in every way foreign, would immediately become the occasion of a kind of knowledge, however illusory this knowledge might be, and the act of hospitality would come to know despite itself, falling irresistibly into inhospitality.

Baudrillard seems to account for this problem by suggesting that the other’s foreignness must be continually maintained over against any understanding of the other that we might obtain, that we must continually set aside whatever knowledge we have of the other and receive the other only as foreigner, as stranger, as unknown.  In this sense, we may certainly relate to the other with respect to our knowledge of the other, must in fact relate to the other in this respect, but this relation is not hospitality as such.  Rather, we are hospitable only to the degree that we are able to set aside our knowledge of the other, with all the relations that attend it, and receive the other apart from this understanding, receive the other simply as other, beyond all understanding, knowledge, and relation.  Hospitality, then, becomes defined, perhaps, as a relation without relation, as a relational gesture that precedes relation as such, that precedes even the possibility of relation, that appears in advance of relation. 

The ethical imperative to hospitality, therefore, in the most practical terms, becomes an imperative for me to recall at all costs the insufficiency of my knowledge to account for the other’s foreignness, and to receive continually the foreignness of the other, the incomprehensibility of the other, despite whatever understanding that I might think I have.

She was beautiful once.  I can tell by the way she holds herself, as if eyes are always on her, as if everyone is watching her, straight and tall, posing, even here at the laundromat, loading the dryers one armful at a time.  There is still something pretty in the way she wears her blond hair high in a ponytail, in her slimness, but there is a tiredness about her also, as if she no longer has the energy to keep her beauty wrapped around her, to keep it against all the things that would pull it away from her.  Her cotton skirt is faded, blue, with a pattern of white dots, and her flip-flops are worn almost to nothing, the thongs frayed and near to breaking, so that she drags them with her feet, with her painted toes, a sliding and awkward walk.  She does not sit as she waits, neither to read nor to talk, just shuffles back and forth down the rows of machines, her arms wrapped around her slender ribs, her head bowed onto her chest.  She seems to move in order not to stop once and for all, as if to stop, even for a moment, would be to stop forever.

So, I have finally gotten around to publishing Lindy through Lulu.com. There is a hardcover format, a trade paperback format, and a free ereader format as well, so hopefully there will be something for everyone. You can find them at this link if you are interested in a copy.

I will also take this opportunity to thank everyone who read along with the story as I posted it, those who took the time to proofread it and offer comments, and those who encouraged me along the way. I also want to offer a special thanks to Dave Humphrey, who typeset the whole thing in LaTeX and made it presentable for me.

After much begging, cajoling, and threatening, my local library has added several Roberto Bolano books to its collection, which I am now in the process of reading.  I will write more about them later, once I have finished the last of them, The Third Reich, but I could not resist posting a sentence from the one I have just finished, Night in Chile, a remarkable little novel.  It had several sentences that deserved being posted, and even one that I had initially planned to post until I ran across this one, which manages to summarize the entirety of the Allende regime in Chile while also running through an education in classical Greek literature, more than most people would attempt in an entire novel never mind a single, staggering sentence.

“I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to Be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature  Prize and Fidel Castro came on visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn’t much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Heroditus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queus for food and Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks, and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a camera man recorded his own death on film, and then Allende’s navel aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d’etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all.”

This is another of the Manitoulin stories. As usual, I have added it to the Island Stories file on the Longer Works page for anyone who would like to read all the stories together.

The Diner

The diner is just across the border of the reserve, filled about equally with local residents and with the cottagers who lease property from the band.  The laws against smoking in public places don’t apply here, and many of the cottagers come here just for that reason, so the dining room is filled with smoke.

There are three officers from the reserve police in the corner closest to the kitchen, farthest from my own table. They speak to the cook through the open doorway with the ease of regulars.  They are tall and well-built, all of them, with closely cut dark hair and handsome faces, wearing very clean, very sharp uniforms, complete with bullet-proof vests and hand guns and brushed caps set carefully on the table beside their plates.  They know they are the symbols of a new kind of reserve that takes care of its own business.  Much of the reserve is lagging behind them, of course, but they are a symbol of what is possible, law and order and beautiful uniforms, all with a native face.

They are drinking coffee from white diner mugs, and one calls into the kitchen, “Hey, Susan, has that Barbeau kid come around since we picked him up?”

“Nope.  Haven’t seen him,” a woman’s voice replies, disembodied, emerging throaty and sensual from the kitchen, a smoker’s voice.  “You guys didn’t rough him up too badly did ya?  He’s really not a bad kid.”

“He took cash from you at knife point, Susan.  He’s a bad kid.”

“He just steals because his mother steals.”

“Maybe, but she steals for booze.  He just does it for kicks.  He’s gonna be a mean one when he gets older.”

“Maybe.  Band should have done something earlier, placed him with an auntie.”

“That’s what they’d do now, for sure.”  He sipped from his mug.  “But times were different then.”

“Says the boy talking to his grandma.”

The three officers all laugh, bright and handsome.

The girl in the next booth looks up at them and then away again before they can meet her eyes.  She is sipping from a mug of coffee also, staring across at an elderly woman in a pink, floral hat, humped over a pot of tea.  The girl is thin, not like an anorexic or an athlete, but like someone whose body only ever bothered to grow upward, spent all its energy on height and had nothing left over for roundness, for breasts or hips.  Her eyes look past the old woman without interest, past the pink hat with its white and blue flowers, past the hand-knitted pink shawl and the blue dress with its delicately scalloped collar.  She looks at the same time fierce and bored.

“How’s your soda, lamby?” the old woman asks.

The girl’s eyes focus for an instant on the elderly face and then drift into the distance again.  “It’s not soda Grandma.  It’s coffee.  And nobody calls it soda anymore.  It’s called pop.” She fidgets, running her thumb along the inside of her necklace, rearranging the salt and pepper shakers, spinning her rings on her fingers. Her eyes drift across the restaurant toward my table, so I look down to my breakfast until her gaze passes over me, just another teen boy eating his breakfast.

The older woman seems either not to hear or not to care.  She sips daintily from her teacup, the perfect caricature of a grandmother.

“Will you need me this afternoon Grandma?” the girl asks.  Her mouth hardly ever moves, even when she speaks.

“What’s that?”  The older woman tilts her head to the left and leans toward her granddaughter.

“I said, “Do you need me for anything this afternoon?”

“No, not today, lamby.  I think I’ll have a bit of a nap after lunch.  You go ahead and have the afternoon to yourself.”

The girl takes a cigarette from her purse and puts it between her lips but leaves it unlit.  “Can I have the car?” she says.  The cigarette twitches in time to her words.

“You know I never let anyone drive it without me,” her grandmother replies, “and you know I can’t abide smoking, so put that dirty thing away.”

“It’s not lit, grandma.”  She takes the cigarette from her mouth and turns it between her fingers until it breaks.  She tosses it into the ashtray.  “Please, grandma.  Daniel’s parents won’t let him use the car anymore.  And he says he shouldn’t come into town for a while.  Can’t I take it just this once?”

“I certainly will not send you off unattended with my car to see some, some Indian.  Certainly not.”

“Native, Grandma. He’s native.  It’s rude to say Indian.”

“I don’t care what you call him. You may not take my car.”

The girl stood up and grabbed her bag from the seat.  “Fine,” she said,  “I’m going for a smoke,” and she stalked to the door, her heels clicking hollowly on the linoleum floor.

“You’re allowed to smoke in here, you know,” said a man as she passed his table.  She ignored him and pushed her way out through the door.  He shrugged and leaned on the table, its edge pressing deeply into the heavy flesh of his bare forearms.

“Did you see that?” he demanded.  The woman across from him never bothered to look up, kept her eyes on the paper, almost tenderly tapping the ash of her cigarette in the ashtray.  Her silence didn’t deter him.  He lit a cigarette of his own.  “So rude,” he said, brushing his long hair out of his face, his eyes squinting in the smoke as he exhaled.   “First we almost hit that one kid.  Runs into the road right in front of us.  Then gives me the finger when I slam on the breaks, like I didn’t just save his life.”

He leaned back in his chair, pulled his t-shirt down over his belly.  “Then that skinny chick…” he stopped himself and looked at the old lady across the restaurant.  “Then that skinny chick, ” he continued, his voice lower, “gives me a look like that.  For trying to be nice.”  He shook his head and idly moved his homefries around his plate.  “Are you listening to me, Jessica?”

The woman made no sign that she had heard him.  Her blond hair hung long on either side of her face.  It swung slightly as her eyes followed the print in front of her.

“Hey!” the man said suddenly, and something in his voice seemed to register with Jessica enough for her to look up as well.  “It’s that kid!” he hissed, half-whispering.  “The kid we almost hit!”

Jessica turned in her chair, looked behind me to the back door, and I turned too.  A teen boy, a bit older than me maybe, stood just inside the door, peering around the angle of the hallway into the restaurant.  The couple by the door could see him, and so could I, but the wall hid him from everyone else.  He seemed intent on the booth where the girl had been sitting, then noticed the three officers and pulled further back into the door jamb.  His dark hair was long and pulled into a ponytail.

The front door opened, and we all turned to see the girl walk in, her jeans hanging low on her thin hips.  She looked to her left, past the couple by the door, past my table, to the boy hiding in the back hall.  Her eyes widened, and she smiled shyly, checked to see whether her grandmother was watching.  “Um, grandma,” she called, “I’m just going to the bathroom, okay?”

Her grandmother looked over the top of her glasses.  “Sure, lamby.”

The girl crossed the diner to the hallway and threw her arms around the boy’s neck, her shirt pulling up to show a bird tattoo in the small of her back.  She tried to kiss his face, but he looked distracted, whispered something in her ear.  She looked over her shoulder to where the three officers were leaning back in their chairs, coffees in hand.  He tried to lead her outside, but she opened the door to the bathroom and pulled him inside.  There was lettering on the back of his leather jacket.  Grizzlies, it read, over a logo of a bear, and then underneath, Daniel Barbeau, Left Wing.

“I should’ve known,” said the man by the door.  He scratched the stubble on his face.  “Those two were meant for each other.”  Jessica had already gone back to her paper.

I finished my food, but the waitress hadn’t been by in a long while.  I thought about going to ask for my bill, but the reserve police got up first.  “Bill please, Susan,” one called.

“Separate?” came the throaty voice.

“Naw, put it all together.  And put my coffee tab on there too.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, Eric.  I’ll get it next time,” one of the others said.  “I’m just gonna use the can.”  He left his hat on the table and strolled across the restaurant to the bathroom, tried the handle.  There was no sound from inside.  “Hey,” he asked, “is anyone in there?”  There was still silence.  He tried the door again.  Susan?” he called, “I think someone locked the bathroom on you.”

“Could you open it for me?” she called back.  “It’s just a toothpick lock.”

The officer knocked again.  “I’m coming in, ” he said, “so speak up if you’re in there.”  There was the sudden sound of glass smashing from inside the bathroom, like a window had been broken out, and then a scrambling noise.  “What the hell?” he said.  He didn’t bother finding a toothpick, just stepped back and broke the door in with a kick.  It swung open on its hinges and banged against the inside of the wall.  A girl’s voice started screaming, and I could see the skinny girl pressed into the far corner of the bathroom, her face in her hands.  The officer leapt to stand on the rim of the toilet, peering out through the broken window on the opposite wall. “It’s no use running, Barbeau, ” he yelled.  “You’ve got no where to go!”

He came back into the restaurant.  One of the other officers threw him his cap, and all three dashed through the door.

“Be gentle with him!” Susan yelled after them, then quieter, so only we could hear, “He’s really not a bad kid.”

I hate writers.

I like people who write, of course, like them very much, even the bad ones.  I also like people who do not write, especially the ones who express themselves creatively through other forms.  But I hate writers, those people who are so worried about being a writer, looking like a writer, talking like a writer, and otherwise occupying the role of the writer that they cannot be bothered with actually writing.

You can tell people who write from writers quite easily.  People who write, actually write.  Writers, however, spend all their time going to writers’ groups and writer’s conferences, and writers’ festivals and writers’ seminars.  They attend book launches and book signings, read books on how to get published, sit on local arts boards, and are always talking about the one short story they published back in university, just the student arts magazine, of course, but still quite an accomplishment for a young and aspiring writer, don’t you think.  When you ask them about their writing, they inevitably talk about the hell of sitting in front of a blank screen, drinking mug after caffeinated mug, struggling against all life’s petty distractions, just to say something real, you know, something meaningful, something that will show what kind of writer they really are.

When it comes to writing, however, the very first criterion is whether or not you actually write.  You either write, or you do not.  Things are really that simple.  There are other criteria, far more ambiguous, that separate good writers from bad, most of which I fear I fail, but the first question is always whether or not you actually write.  Do you have the need to write, the drive to write, the compulsion to write, the discipline to write?  Are you unable to go without writing?  Is it necessary to you, like an addiction or disease?  Then you are a writer, no matter how badly you write.  Do you spend more time reading books about writing and going to book signings than you actually do writing?  Then you are not a writer, no matter how much you claim to be.