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cincinnatus_c
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 23. Up to 33 or somesuch yesterday. Coming back from Vancouver was like leaving Canada for the tropics.
I thought I might invert tradition this year and interrupt a long stretch of not posting with a stretch of posting from Congress (né Learneds). No such luck.
In Vancouver, L. saw her first beaver, I saw my first seal, and we both saw our first naked hippies. The beaver was resolutely attempting to stop up the outflow grate from the marsh it lives in, which is called Beaver Lake, which is fortunately only half a misnomer and not a complete misnomer as we judged at first glance. It was yanking out lily pads by the roots and plastering them with mud against the grate, over and over and over, while we, and a few other passersby, stood there a few feet away and watched and smiled. (Surprisingly, telling this story to people has elicited at least a couple of reactions to the effect that beavers are nasty and vicious animals. Having been acquainted at a distance with at least a couple of beavers over the course of a number of years, I'd have to say that, in my experience, beavers are most interested in staying the hell away from people--so the complete nonchalance of this beaver in Beaver Lake was also quite surprising.)
Let me tell you something: you might think that you're not interested in totem poles, but being up close to the old massive woodiness of a totem pole (by which I don't mean the new and often brightly painted ones that you see here and there around Vancouver, but the old raw wood ones they have in the UBC Museum of Anthropology), you might find that it's really quite striking.
Vancouver after Saskatoon last year and coming from Toronto was very interesting in this respect: there is an aboriginal presence around Vancouver, as there is not in Toronto, which is very different from the aboriginal presence around Saskatoon (where, at a glance, there are more aboriginal people). In Saskatoon, the sense I got, and this is the sense you get about aboriginal people in Ontario, is that the aboriginals are a social problem: they're poor, many are addicted, they're living the legacy of oppression, carrying historical grievances. Around Vancouver, the sense is not so much of a poor and broken class and more of a culture interrupted. I guess, but I don't know, that this may be simply because there was a concentration of a particular kind of culture around southern BC--totem carving and potlatch. So there's this revival of West Coast aboriginal culture that started in the '60s or so. I have no idea how strong it is, but it's there. One thing I wonder about this as I'm walking around the Museum of Anthropology: the earliest totem poles they have are from the mid-19th century. So when did they start totem carving? ("Eskimo carving", I have heard, was a 20th-century invention. I've read that the southwestern peyote religion is only a century or two old.) Of course, wood is a perishable medium, especially when it's outdoors, but I wonder. And I wonder what it would be for, say, me to "revive my culture".
Every time I've gone into used bookstore in the last few years, I've looked for books by Al Purdy with either "Wilderness Gothic" or "The Country North of Belleville" in them. There was a Purdy book once, in The Bookstore Beside the World's Biggest Bookstore, but it didn't have those poems. In Vancouver, we went into three used bookstores, and the second had Wild Grape Wine, which has "Wilderness Gothic", and the third had Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, which is a greatest hits book and has both (and was a "Canada Reads" selection in 2006, which makes it kind of surprising that I hadn't come across it in a used bookstore before), and also "At the Quinte Hotel", which the Tragically Hip made a video of--you might know it as the "for I am a sensitive man" poem. At the bookstore where I bought Wild Grape Wine--which was a hardcover (a "first edition", you'd say, come to think of it) and $15, which may be the most I've ever paid for a used book for myself--the guy behind the counter was talking with another guy about soccer (which people didn't used to to do in Canada, but now they do), and when I paid for the book he said he was glad that people were still reading Al Purdy, and did I know that Purdy lived in Vancouver for a while, and when Purdy lived in Vancouver he came in to this shop and gave this guy his card which said "Al Purdy, Bookseller", and that Purdy hoped that this would get him a discount. As L. and I were leaving, he was telling the other guy that the last time Purdy came in to the shop, he was with Steven Reid (or something like that--the famous Canadian criminal, bank robber or something).
The most impressive thing upon our arrival at UBC was the flowers--so many different colours of flowers, mostly flowering from two or three different kinds of bushes. And then a funny thing happened: after a couple of days of rushing back and forth between sessions of two different conferences, I realized that the flowers had disappeared, and I wondered if it was the flowers or me, and then in the last couple of days when the rushing stopped, the flowers reappeared.
I think the most amusing moment of my week--apart from the beaver, I mean--was when Gad Horowitz told me that I should be careful because I was sounding like Leo Strauss. "Oh, I'm quite conscious of that," I said. (In that particular paper, I was even consciously writing in the style of Strauss--although not reading it that way, which meant reading it with some "and"s and "but"s and "because of this"s thrown in. In Strauss's oracular style, every sentence is made to stand on its own, as if prepared to be read in fragments, like the pre-Socratics. Heidegger also writes that way.) The next morning I ran into someone lost on the road who wanted to go where I was heading, and along the way he told me--because I told him that I was giving a paper on the Charmides--that he had been Allan Bloom's TA at U of Toronto in the '70s when Bloom was "on the run from the black students union at Cornell". He said that Bloom chain-smoked in class and the students loved him although Bloom thought the students were all idiots.
This is the first year that I'm encountering people who have heard of me. I don't know where we're going, but maybe we're getting there. One thing that became apparent to me last week is that I am learning the steps of Plato well and the dance is joyful. (Of course there are those who think the dance is all wrong, but that's joyful too. Once you're really dancing, everything is joyful, getting knocked down and dancing on your back is joyful, and there are those who think your dance is all wrong but love it anyway because it's joyful, like the greybeard who grinned all the way through my Charmides paper.) Meanwhile, back on the ranch, word arrived that two more little job possibilities for next year were closed off. It's looking a lot like another year in the wilderness with one half course and a four-figure academic employment income, but who knows. The next six weeks, I'm bookifying my dissertation. I'm not sure whether this means you'll be seeing more of me or not.
I thought I might invert tradition this year and interrupt a long stretch of not posting with a stretch of posting from Congress (né Learneds). No such luck.
In Vancouver, L. saw her first beaver, I saw my first seal, and we both saw our first naked hippies. The beaver was resolutely attempting to stop up the outflow grate from the marsh it lives in, which is called Beaver Lake, which is fortunately only half a misnomer and not a complete misnomer as we judged at first glance. It was yanking out lily pads by the roots and plastering them with mud against the grate, over and over and over, while we, and a few other passersby, stood there a few feet away and watched and smiled. (Surprisingly, telling this story to people has elicited at least a couple of reactions to the effect that beavers are nasty and vicious animals. Having been acquainted at a distance with at least a couple of beavers over the course of a number of years, I'd have to say that, in my experience, beavers are most interested in staying the hell away from people--so the complete nonchalance of this beaver in Beaver Lake was also quite surprising.)
Let me tell you something: you might think that you're not interested in totem poles, but being up close to the old massive woodiness of a totem pole (by which I don't mean the new and often brightly painted ones that you see here and there around Vancouver, but the old raw wood ones they have in the UBC Museum of Anthropology), you might find that it's really quite striking.
Vancouver after Saskatoon last year and coming from Toronto was very interesting in this respect: there is an aboriginal presence around Vancouver, as there is not in Toronto, which is very different from the aboriginal presence around Saskatoon (where, at a glance, there are more aboriginal people). In Saskatoon, the sense I got, and this is the sense you get about aboriginal people in Ontario, is that the aboriginals are a social problem: they're poor, many are addicted, they're living the legacy of oppression, carrying historical grievances. Around Vancouver, the sense is not so much of a poor and broken class and more of a culture interrupted. I guess, but I don't know, that this may be simply because there was a concentration of a particular kind of culture around southern BC--totem carving and potlatch. So there's this revival of West Coast aboriginal culture that started in the '60s or so. I have no idea how strong it is, but it's there. One thing I wonder about this as I'm walking around the Museum of Anthropology: the earliest totem poles they have are from the mid-19th century. So when did they start totem carving? ("Eskimo carving", I have heard, was a 20th-century invention. I've read that the southwestern peyote religion is only a century or two old.) Of course, wood is a perishable medium, especially when it's outdoors, but I wonder. And I wonder what it would be for, say, me to "revive my culture".
Every time I've gone into used bookstore in the last few years, I've looked for books by Al Purdy with either "Wilderness Gothic" or "The Country North of Belleville" in them. There was a Purdy book once, in The Bookstore Beside the World's Biggest Bookstore, but it didn't have those poems. In Vancouver, we went into three used bookstores, and the second had Wild Grape Wine, which has "Wilderness Gothic", and the third had Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, which is a greatest hits book and has both (and was a "Canada Reads" selection in 2006, which makes it kind of surprising that I hadn't come across it in a used bookstore before), and also "At the Quinte Hotel", which the Tragically Hip made a video of--you might know it as the "for I am a sensitive man" poem. At the bookstore where I bought Wild Grape Wine--which was a hardcover (a "first edition", you'd say, come to think of it) and $15, which may be the most I've ever paid for a used book for myself--the guy behind the counter was talking with another guy about soccer (which people didn't used to to do in Canada, but now they do), and when I paid for the book he said he was glad that people were still reading Al Purdy, and did I know that Purdy lived in Vancouver for a while, and when Purdy lived in Vancouver he came in to this shop and gave this guy his card which said "Al Purdy, Bookseller", and that Purdy hoped that this would get him a discount. As L. and I were leaving, he was telling the other guy that the last time Purdy came in to the shop, he was with Steven Reid (or something like that--the famous Canadian criminal, bank robber or something).
The most impressive thing upon our arrival at UBC was the flowers--so many different colours of flowers, mostly flowering from two or three different kinds of bushes. And then a funny thing happened: after a couple of days of rushing back and forth between sessions of two different conferences, I realized that the flowers had disappeared, and I wondered if it was the flowers or me, and then in the last couple of days when the rushing stopped, the flowers reappeared.
I think the most amusing moment of my week--apart from the beaver, I mean--was when Gad Horowitz told me that I should be careful because I was sounding like Leo Strauss. "Oh, I'm quite conscious of that," I said. (In that particular paper, I was even consciously writing in the style of Strauss--although not reading it that way, which meant reading it with some "and"s and "but"s and "because of this"s thrown in. In Strauss's oracular style, every sentence is made to stand on its own, as if prepared to be read in fragments, like the pre-Socratics. Heidegger also writes that way.) The next morning I ran into someone lost on the road who wanted to go where I was heading, and along the way he told me--because I told him that I was giving a paper on the Charmides--that he had been Allan Bloom's TA at U of Toronto in the '70s when Bloom was "on the run from the black students union at Cornell". He said that Bloom chain-smoked in class and the students loved him although Bloom thought the students were all idiots.
This is the first year that I'm encountering people who have heard of me. I don't know where we're going, but maybe we're getting there. One thing that became apparent to me last week is that I am learning the steps of Plato well and the dance is joyful. (Of course there are those who think the dance is all wrong, but that's joyful too. Once you're really dancing, everything is joyful, getting knocked down and dancing on your back is joyful, and there are those who think your dance is all wrong but love it anyway because it's joyful, like the greybeard who grinned all the way through my Charmides paper.) Meanwhile, back on the ranch, word arrived that two more little job possibilities for next year were closed off. It's looking a lot like another year in the wilderness with one half course and a four-figure academic employment income, but who knows. The next six weeks, I'm bookifying my dissertation. I'm not sure whether this means you'll be seeing more of me or not.
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Date: 2008-06-11 10:51 am (UTC)We lived, when I was in the sixth and seventh grade, right across the river from the Navajo Reservation. (A reservation so large it is sometimes, rightly, called "the Navajo Nation.") Our lives, for that part of my childhood, were wonderfully full of and enriched by many things 'aboriginal.' My elementary school was actually built on top of an unexcavated Anasazi pueblo - so we would dig around during recess and find old pottery shards; literally jars and jars full by the time we moved away. My father worked with ranchers, mostly, and spent his days driving around the mesas and in the pinon juniper forests. He would run into old, untouched Anasazi cliff dwellings, and take us back to them on the weekends. My mother 'babysat' for two young professional Navajo women, and their beautiful daughters became part of our family for much of the time we were there. These women would bring us blankets, and "Ojos de Dios", and Navajo Fry Bread, which is so tasty with honey. While we were not all that often directly on the reservation, we were surrounded by things Navajo. My middle school was about 40% Navajo, about the same percentage Mexican, and the rest of us white, white, white. All this was just an intensification of an 'Indian' theme that ran though my childhood. My father had on his shelf, and I read, "Ishi" and "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and "I Will Fight No More, Forever." He kept a picture of Chief Jospeh on the wall of his office my entire childhood. We also lived two years in Wyoming, right across a fence line from the Wind River Reservation - which is, I beleive, the second largest reservation in the states - though that area wasn't nearly so imbued with "Indian" as where we lived in New Mexico. Anyway ... back to the anecdote.
I don't mean this as a political commentary. It is certainly being relayed from memory which would have been colored by my parents discussion of it. I recalled it after reading a NYT bit about Navajo poverty a couple years ago.
Every now and then, the government will go in and build houses 'for the indians' on reservation land. Small subdivisions of nice suburban homes. The Navajo will sometimes bust out the doors and windows, and put up blankets in their place, and will let the lawns revert to desert. Many of the locals look on and say 'those dirty indians' (this was the 70s), and the NYT comes through and says 'those poor impoverished Native Americans' and the Navajo, in the middle of their nation, are living according to their own lights.
I may repost some of this in my journal and on the aviary.
~