So I took this class (writing for magazines) because I like (sometimes) to write and I thought a new style might be interesting. I was right about that. Love the class. It’s a real “how to.” The teacher is great, providing practical instruction backed by a whole lot of personal experience.

Here’s the first little assignment. We had to submit a description of something – a place or event and not use the word “I”. Bad me, I procrastinated and then had to write it in the hour before class. Hence, I picked something from my own history because I am fundamentally not a fiction writer. Nevertheless, this was fun. I got to make me into something I’m not and not feel bad about it.

Edna hummed tunelessly as she came up to the final bend before the long straightaway. Around the curve a crow at the edge of the road pecked at a flattened house cat, the orange hair still visible on parts of the tail, but its face gone all these days into its death. “Get now” Edna told the crow. “Get” as she slowed coming up onto the crow, “get” until the bird let go its meal and hopped out of the path of the car. She sped up a bit then, the long road, narrow between the pocket farms with their geese and gardens; a road usually empty of other people but this time not. A white four door, venerable, slightly dusty but unmarked, with good paint and good tires. Edna slowed again, and looked for the white peacocks that were usually strutting this time of the day at the blue farm. Not there, Edna sighed and with one hand straightened her box of tissues that had slipped from its place on the shelf below the dash. She glanced up for the white car, just ahead now, and slowed even more. She picked at a piece of dust on the shelf made visible by the now properly square tissue box. Her eyes moved back to the white car; her hands clutched at the wheel as she braked. The car, so close now she could see the streaks in the young men’s hair, Edna slowed to a crawl to stop from hitting them. She saw the driver turn to grin at the passenger.

The heat of the car, now that she was moving so slowly, bloomed. She undid the button at her throat, dropped her speed until she had enough room to move around the car and pulled into the oncoming lane to pass. The young man stepped on the gas to keep up with her. Edna’s head snapped up as she turned to look at them; she saw the driver’s blonde head turn and the passenger’s wide grin turn into an open mouthed laugh. She slid the car back behind them. The white car slowed again. Crawling, Edna’s face flushed.

From the little wetland she passed a red-winged blackbird flashed and the deep mud smell of the rushes flowed up into the air tumbled by the wings’ passage. Edna hardly noticed, her eyes merely twitched toward the bird now vanished back into the reeds at the back of the wet. She pulled back again, giving her self room to pass and when she tried to move ahead, again the boys pulled in front of her. Their mother’s car, she thought, as she yanked her steering wheel and aimed her car right for the driver.

The grin froze and later, Edna remembered herself laughing that rather unbecoming snort like thing she sometimes did. The boy yanked his wheel too, but unlike Edna, he was close enough to the edge of the road that in order to avoid her, the edge of his passenger-side tire went too far and caught in the ploughed dirt. The car tipped, the wheel jerked from his hands and the boys went over the edge, off the road, the car bumping, sliding sideways into the fallow field, brown dirt billowing in waves around them, as if they had hit a patch of black ice and landed in a half frozen muddy lake.

Edna relaxed her grip on the wheel, undid another button to cool down, and then sped up.

The last two days in the archives have furnished me with several treasures. One of them is a book published in 1930 called Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach. The second of three parts is dedicated to “The Dorion Woman.” Otherwise known as Marie Dorion, she was a 25 year old woman that traveled with 2 children from Oklahoma  to Missouri to northern Wyoming all the way to the Pacific. Along the way she had another child – he died 2 days into his life. Madame Dorion ended up near Salem Oregon where she died in 1850 at the age of about 67.

If you read about this woman on the net and in the texts produced about her, what you get is often the bones of the Astoria trek to the mouth of the Columbia, and a lot about her apparently abusive husband, and the stuff about her bearing her third son on the trail, but mostly what you get is the author’s view of what all this means. “Marie” makes a perfect canvas for our views about women and the qualities we assign them because so little is known about who she, in fact, was. I mean we don’t even know her actual name. She is called Dorion Woman because her husband’s paternal name was “Dorion” and she was his woman.

We know this, at least in part, because of Washington Irving and his “Tragical Story Told by the Squaw of Pierre Dorion.” Much emphasis is given in Irving’s account to her “presence of mind and force of character” and certainly her survival seems, from the story, due in part to her attention to her household duties. This is why, for example, she had all the supplies that she would need in the near future if she and her children were to survive the winter. The story she tells, and that Irving would relay, about the fate of the Astoria party is what made her memorable to the public but no one, it seems, thought to ask her name.

Time tells much about women’s interpretors. Irving published his story in 1836. Defenbach published his in 1929 0r 30.  Both accounts pay attention to Pierre Dorion, Irving calling him the “hybrid interpretor” as a way of describing his bi-racial heritage. Irving doesn’t mention the drunkenness as far as I know. There is a section when he is describing the French boatmen and how they lift their flagging spirits – by song, nary a drop of spirit is mentioned. But at that time alcohol might have been seen as a problem with respect to trading with Indians (their abode being the destination of the boatmen, trade goods being the cargo) and granted as a necessity to those water-haulers whose spirits needed lifting, but no one had come up with the idea of denying it to civilized white folk yet.

But by Defenbach’s time prohibition and its ideas had taken its toll on the interpretive mind of writers. In his story much attention is paid to Pierre Dorion’s use of alcohol.  However, there is still a touch of admiration: “When sober,” Defenbach says “the stalwart young half-breed was a fellow of recognized ability as a trapper and trader. He had worked for Choteau and other Americans who were beginning to resist the monopoly of the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay and other British concerns.”  A drunk, yes, but he could hunt, trap, shoot and, on top of that, was on the right side politically. But when it comes to Marie…

(Pierre’s) proved himself faithful and serviceable. His occupation called for almost constant travel up and down the Big River, and in these journeyings he usually dragged the squaw with him. Nor was this his only encumbrance. The couple’s first son, the sturdy Baptiste, was born in 1806, and two or thee years later another lad arrived at the tepee. This latter was a frailer type of boy, with snake-like eyes and a mouth that extended from ear to ear; they named him “Paul.”

To these two children the Woman clung with the savage devotion of a mother-wolf, bringing them up after the Indian fashion. There was no discipline, the few instructions given having to do only with the children’s physical requirements. The only virtues inculcated were those of fortitude and courage, and even these traits were warped into ferocity and thirst for blood. Such ideals as those of morality, gratitude, truthfulness, unselfishness and honesty were not sought to be conveyed by the Woman to her children, primarily because she had no such ideals herself or any conception of them. The first precepts she instilled into those young hearts were those of cruelty, murder, and rapine.

Jeez.

Shortly after this little exploration of the Woman’s character and moral rectitude (compare Irving’s and Defenbach’s ideas about the ideal woman), he talks about Pierre’s accidnetal fall into the trip to the Pacific, which he would not survive but his wife and children would. This fall, the story leads us to believe, came because of alcohol.

The processes of evolution have never produced anything more averse to solitude than is whiskey, even a quart of it…Pierre found himself surrounded by, or perhaps one might better say surrounding, a whole flock of quarts. He passed through alternating stages of hilarity, amiability, deep melancholy, and extreme irritability. Several days and nights passed in the enjoyment or suffering of these various emotions.

(Aside: the use of the word “evolution” adds a nice little sparkle from the conceptual bounty that is Social Darwinism – also something alive and well during Defenbach’s time. I wonder if he was a eugenicist?)

What follows is a rendition of what Defenbach thinks happened when a drunk, angry and now without the salary due him by the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, and includes an almost jovial boxing match between husband and wife. The outcome is that Pierre Dorion finds himself working for Lisa and having to cart his wife and two sons along for the ride.

Ultimately, Defenbach (nor Irving for that matter) doesn’t say much about Marie Dorion but what he inadvertently says about how he sees the world is enormous. Apart from the idea of what women are, there is the purchase place for blame. It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s when Defenbach was probably writing this text, that alcohol got much of it. Poor old Pierre, a noble sort with his rustic trade, but reduced to dragging his baggage around, getting hobbled by a treacherous Spaniard, a snake-eyed son and by that morally bankrupt Woman. Think what he could have made of himself if wasn’t for that demon rum!

meh

Would that there was someone who would haunt Oregon’s historical archives for a more accurate view of the woman. I haven’t had time for that yet, so perhaps it already exists. I’ll have to check into it.

When I cook eggs for breakfast generally I prefer them coddled. That is, cooked without their shell in water just below boiling point. Where I live most people call this type of egg “poached.” Although I am sure both words can (and are) used interchangeably, I think they really carry different instructions. When I poach fish, for example, the water actually reaches a very slow boil or what this woman calls a slow simmer.

When I coddle eggs I don’t use a pipkin or a coddler, I just gently pour out the egg onto a shallow saucer and then when the water is the right temperature slide the egg into the hot water where the water meets the side of the pan. This way the egg stays together and doesn’t shred into the water making it all cloudy and the egg inedible.

I prefer the word “coddle” to “poach.” It has something to do with the sound itself, but also the words are resonant with meaning.  They go off in my head in ways that create different sensations.  ”Coddle” is something that evokes warm-bliss-raisin-toast-and-butter feelings.  ”Poached” is a too-long-at-the-beach-tight-face sort of word for me. I mean, really, how do you think the salmon feels?

So with my toast and tea I am having coddled eggs. It makes me feel better, even if while writing this I have forgotten to check the water and my egg is just a touch ragged.

I have little acquaintance with Charles Lamb and until I purchased The Essays of Elia I had only read one of his poems and that assigned in an English class somewhere, at some time. The Old Familiar Faces is a bit sentimental for my tastes and so though his name (and that of his sister Mary) had floated around in the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I had read nothing of him that made me understand the felt equivalence of the authors.

And then I found – in probably my favourite tiny used bookstore in Vancouver – a delightful burgundy bound small volume of Elia’s essays published and printed by Collins’ Clear-Type Press sometime around 1905. Some $19 later, I carried the little book up the street to the coffee shop, ordered my latte and started reading. I read “The South-Sea House” first and was delighted by the whimsicality of the characters but there was something else, like a deep current under the words. I couldn’t stop there and glanced through the table of contents and came upon “Witches and Other Night Fears.” Given my fascination for the use of female power images in other writers, that was were I went next.

He seems to me a very careful writer. That is, I sincerely doubt whether his juxtapositions were not carefully considered. He seems an author that delights in the subtle indicator, the quiet joke to make palatable a difficult truth. So when he begins the essay with a discussion about the “creed of witchcraft” and the problem of interpretation (taking our ancestors to be fools for belief) only to follow it closely with a child’s interpretation of Stackhouse’s biblical explication (and his “brief, modest and satisfactory” solutions to numerous apparent biblical contradictions), it seems unlikely that such a juxtaposition was not intended to order our experience and create meaning.

For me the moment of deepest, although quiet, hilarity in that essay is the scene where the young Elia is exposed in his dedication to Stackhouse’s book. The pictures, it seems, had his devotion.

In my father’s book-closet, the “History of the Bible,” by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station.  The pictures with which it abounds–one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot–attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.

Sitting in the coffee shop, I had to place the little red-ribbon book marker, place the book upon the table and simply grin.

That child, straining for a book probably placed on a high shelf just so he wouldn’t see it, just as parents in the ’70s hid their copy of The Joy of Sex from their children, this is Lamb for me, this quiet teaching, this delight in the whimsical, the deep respect for what is real about how people go about things.

It made me want to find a digital copy of Stackhouse just so I could see the Witch. So I did, and after a diligent search (which made me late for work), I found a copy of the volumes and a copy of the Witch. Here she is. Can you make her out?

More on Lamb later. The dude is my hero.

(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.

My copy of L’élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery came last night.  I am so excited. It is going to be very hard going for me, especially at first, to read it in French, but that fact, along with how much I love the book, is what is going to make the process fun. (Part of me finds that really weird.)

Maybe that’s why I keep banging my head against philosophy. Same combo. It’s really hard to get my head around some of the ideas that must seem so very logical to those who perpetrated them on history, but I just can’t get there without really, really hard work.  Someone I have been emailing with recently said that this is, in part, because I don’t share the same cultural assumptions as those writers/thinkers. I suppose that’s what makes it hard work, because to understand, one must first unearth one’s own assumptions, and, if not uproot them, at least pot them so that they can be moved about one’s intellectual garden. A must, if another (or self) is to be understood.

For me learning another language is like that. First it’s very much a chore, since I might be good at many things, but learning language is not one of them. Second, one of the things that makes reading so much fun are the connotative links that enrich words like “hedgehog.”  The thing is that the links for “hedgehog” are different than the ones for “hérisson” despite their denotative similarity. So (re) learning to read in French is like taking on a new kind of philosophy — let’s call it narrative philosophy, unless you come up with something more fitting.

Unfortunately, I can’t get started just yet. I have this ENORMOUS crunch at work that won’t let up for another 10 days or so. Hérisson will have to wait until then. Speaking of work – I’m late. Gotta go.

I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society recently. I devoured it, which as lovely as it is, didn’t take very long. I felt comforted by the book, which is odd since it is about war and the effects it has on an occupied people. I’ve been thinking about it since and wanted just to give you some idea of how I’m thinking about it, since I haven’t come to any conclusions about this.
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Generally I read poetry before bed.  It helps compose my emotions, to allow me to slide more easily into what has become increasingly difficult to attain — the restful oblivion of a long night’s sleep.  Of late though, I have been reading Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. It’s a delightful, light book and would normally be perfect for the calm, happy state of mind that I find a doorway to the dark warm queendom that is my world out from under the control of reason and wakefulness. Reichl’s comfort with privilege, her love of the senses, her essential stability as a person, all conspire to persuade her reader’s of their capacity for the same blissful state.

At any other time, I suspect Reichel of making me deeply happy. Unfortunately, given the baleful glares and deep imprecations of my surgeon (see Dr. B, I am blaming you again!), I am unable to partake of such fare as Ms Reichl wantonly blandishes throughout her pages. Damn if I don’t end up going to bed and dreaming of drawn butter, curry sauce and cannelloni and I don’t even like cannelloni.

The lesson learned: the power of literature to move one’s imagination? No. Instead, the demonic nature of crack surgeons.

I’ve just read Elegance of the Hedgehog. This is a personal assessment of course, but I do consider it to be one of the best books I have ever read. There seems to me hardly a misstep, and the one place I can say that I argued with the text, I can’t really say it is a misstep so much as I just disagree with the conclusion reached.

I’m going to end up writing on this and surrounding subjects again I expect. There is just so much in there apart from the delightful, if sometimes grief riven, story.  There is an image that recurs: camellia on moss. The book is such a thing. A little stillness in the storm. A quiet humane voice. Not a window or a door, but, in Deleuzian terms, a fold that moves one into beauty or, more accurately, moves beauty and the reader until we co-habit.
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Sometimes not only are we not part of the conversation, sometimes we are not even on the same playing field. I think Brian O’Nolan may have felt like that as an author. When he submitted (as Flann O’Brien) The Third Policeman to his publishers it was rejected as too fantastic. The manuscript sat on his sideboard chastising him (as I think of it) for the next quarter century and during that time he told friends that enquired of its fate that the manuscript had been irretrievably lost. It wasn’t published until after his death, and now, of course, it is considered “a masterpiece.”
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