Gathering insinuations

A novel is a web of gathering insinuations, said novelist Doris Lessing, and I see the web of insinuations making a clear pattern in the brilliant USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. The beginnings of the labor movement in the U.S., the conflict between ideas and behaviour. "The woikin man gits f'rooked whatever way you look at it," said Gus, "and I don't know whether it's his friends or his enemies does the worst 'rooking." ( USA Trilogy, Part 3, The Big Money) Didn't I just read something about millionaires in the cabinet of the socialist, so-called, Hollande government in France? Are we doomed to such gaps between talking the talk and walking the walk?

I was telling my Artchat Podcast buddies ACP 78, Curation as a Social Act about the prescience of Dos Passos, who uses mini biographies as one of his narrative modes. The subjects are men and women who defined the 20th century in my view, both the well known, such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and the lesser known but influential such as Eugene Debs, whose story was crucial in forming my political views when I was a teenager, and Robert La Follette, and Minor Kieth, whom I had not heard of until I read this book and learned through his mini bio how the United Fruit Company came to be and how it created the conditions that fostered the Latin America of today. Andrew Carnegie, Luther Burbank, Isadora Duncan, JP Morgan, The Wright Brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Who are the people of our time that our descendants will be talking and writing about, and under whose influence they will be living, 75 years from now?


Thinking about Dos Passos

Re-reading the USA Trilogy again. The copy I have is one I gave to my brother Tim in 1968, back when we were fighting about the Vietnam War. The cover price for this two-inch thick illustrated softback, its cloth cover losing threads by now, is $2.85. I remember buying it in a bookstore in either San Francisco or Santa Rosa. Probably the former.
     Dos Passos had a grand vision for content and style. In my view, he wanted to present the sweep of events and characters that would create the U.S.A. of the 20th century. A big theme, and one that influenced me in the 60's, is the tension between labor and capital. He began pre-WWI in the first book of the trilogy, The 49th Parallel, and continued through the war until a few years after it. The result is a mosaic of news events, popular songs, short biographies of characters who shaped the times, like Eugene Debs, Robert Follett, Thomas Edison, a continuing stream of consciousness autobiography, and the developing stories of various characters, working men and women, businessmen, politicians, journalists.
     The period he writes about is the same in which my new novel Presto!
is set. The difference is that while DP's canvas is huge and crammed with content that gives a thorough sense of the times, I have restricted myself to the point of view of a single character and events that occur through a single ten day stretch. Yet I see that my character is affected by the many of the same events and the consciousness of the time DP so thoroughly depicts. I am inspired by his use of different styles of narrative, including the newspaper headlines. To think that even before radio, the many newspapers with their many daily editions were able to keep people, if not instantly informed, like now, at least current! As I work on either the last or next to last draft of Presto, I am thinking too of graphics within novels. How they can open and enhance the text.



How to sum up?

Trying to think of a paragraph that will succinctly describe work that began in the late 1980's, over twenty years since I wrote the first story about what critics called "an uncommon common woman". This is a different kind of challenge, the summing up of a story in a short paragraph that will entice readers. My Ebook, The Shinny's Girls Trilogy, is ready for copyediting. Satisfying to see the three volumes in one file.

Wet Coast

Such a contrast. As many shades of grey as words for snow. Blurry edges. Wet air, good on skin. Cool room, great for sleeping. Mold inside car. Quiet, quiet. Tires roll through scallops of rain, splashing down the hill. A brooding tranquility. Dripping conifers. Muted palette. In the drug store, on seniors day, people are chatty. All English. Québec me manque. La lumière en particulier.

Shinny's Girls (the novella), re-revisited

I missed many things on the first edit (including whole pages) of the scanned in novella. Now, on my desktop computer I am seeing errors more easily and feeling that I might not write that book today, not in the same way. Yet, I am attached to the character. To be true to my original idea of re-publishing originals, I have to look at it as a historical novel to some extent. Writing style, content. The history of me as a writer and the history of my characters in the late 80's. Cannot resist making improvements, however. As my friend and e-mentor Steve has reminded me, an ebook remains a live document. The writer can make changes any time. Whew! The eternal writing process?

Reaching an audience

Notes from a talk to Le Groupe Esperanza, Le Cercle de la Garnison (Garrison Club), Quebec City, 2/12/13

(After describing how my work borrows from experience while not being autobiographical, I introduced my new project:

"Meantime, since my first book was published in 1986, the world has changed. As most of you know, the publishing world is not what it was. Fewer books are being published in the conventional way, more as e-books. A friend and colleague convinced me that I should embrace this new culture, and so, with his help, I am preparing the Shinny's Girls trilogy for ebook publication this summer. It was a very interesting process of scanning in the text from the two previously published novels, and revising old work. I found that I wanted to rewrite parts of the first, to improve the quality of the writing, for though it was my best selling book, it was not as well written as Flashing Yellow; but I made some changes to the text of that novel, too.
We are about midway through the process of preparing the trilogy for publication, with several aspects to explore. But the popular Canadian/British writer Cory Doctorow has provided a wonderful template regarding distribution, where he offers his books at different price points, from free-downloadable, to print on demand, to traditional hardcover, high-quality – a real work of art for a significantly higher price. Finally, stories that are custom written. He has pioneered in literature what has been happening to the way people consume news, for example, or entertainment such as videos. Instead of everyone tuning into CBC's The National at the same time each day, people customize their news consumption. Perhaps watch the National on TV; perhaps download it to watch when they want; perhaps seek other sources of news, Al Jazeera or BBC via the internet. It is no longer so much the case that the entire country is riveted on a single TV series, such as Dallas... who shot J galvanizing water cooler talk. I might order a TV series from Netflix, you might order another. What we watch and listen to, and read is becoming more finely tuned to individual tastes, through the Internet.
And so, in this new world, readers who have read my trilogy, may request that I continue the story about one or more characters. Someone may want to know what happened to Shinny, or Elfie, or Matthew, or Annette and her goats, and for a considerable sum, I would write that story for them."



January

Between - 30 and -40: Frozen rims of glasses burn cheekbones; midnight blue sky with squashed melon moon; old and young men, women, children, faces hidden by capuchons,or hats with the ear flap, the flaps down. Salt, traffic slush... even that frozen. Buses dutifully run. On Les Plaines, sunlight on snow, wind slicing across my face. It is so exhilerating. Yet, we may be a softer race of people than our ancestors. Coureurs du bois running through the snow, the characters in Maria Chapdelaine. Indians, trappers, settlers.

Up to 7 c, a big thaw,  after freezing rain and normal light rain, the snow seeps into the plains. Wells have opened around trees. Paths are brown. Yesterday les troittoirs were icy. First time I slipped the crampons over my boots and kept them on until I got to school. Then big winds, over 50 kph sustained, and frequent gusts to over 100. Wonderful wild sound, then snow, a skiff of snow. Enough to frost brown surfaces, frozen slick now, since the thaw.

The man who reports the weather on CBC Quebec said that in his 30 year career, January, 2013, was the first month in which there had been warnings for all kinds of extreme events, winter storms, freezing rain, high winds, heavy rain, extreme low temperatures,snow squalls...

Advice?

In an interview this morning on one of my favourite CBC radio shows, The Current, Anna Maria Tremonte asked her former colleague Lisa Gabriele how it came about that she wrote the soon to be bestseller Secret, which is apparently an erotic novel, like Fifty Shades of Grey. The author replied that she had always been ready to "sell out" so that she could be a full-time writer, and that Kevin O'Leary of the Dragon's Den, a business show she produced for five years, told her that if you you're not making money at it, what you do is a hobby.

Sheesh! This was advice to a writer? Should we call on authors whose works define our culture, though most died penniless, for an opinion on that?  I don't need Kevin O'Leary's advice about writing. Money does not define the value of what I produce, nor how I define myself. I'm a lifer, helpless not to be.

While I am on the subject of CBC and books, however, it continues to mildly bug me that if an employee of CBC writes a book, it is almost guaranteed to be the subject of  one, if not more programs on both radio and TV. Hmm. Maybe Gabriele stumbled on another road to the monetary and popular success she craves.

Presto rests

Another plateau. What fascinates me about the process of writing a novel - one of the things - is how an idea seems to come when I acknowledge the need for one, as if it has been waiting for an invitation. I felt something was missing, that the first person voice focussed the story but perhaps in too narrow a fashion. Now I have an idea that not only widens the focus but also helps me firm allusions to Dos Passos. By letting the new melange rest for about a month, until I am back in B.C. and working on my usual computer and have access to research materials I collected, I should be prepared to complete a final, so-called, draft, because the process of revision never ends, only stops from time to time.

The Sun...

...rose to the right of  Martello Tower 1 at the solstice. Now, January 23, it rises to the left of the Tower. On these brilliant mornings I see what inspired painters such as AY Jackson, and so many Quebec landscape artists. The lavender and deep blue shadows created by wind-sculpted snow; later in the day, scallops of yellow, even cantaloupe, colouring  drifts as the sun falls.

.

-40 this morning. A runner on the Plains of Abraham, also a hooded figure, on snowshoes, stopping to pick up his dog's poop before continuing. Ah, Quebec! Ah winter!


Thinking of time in Presto

The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

She lives in the present but is consumed by a past in which she cannot imagine the future. Another voice does that for her. The voice of God? The author-narrator? Not there yet.

Le pont de 12 à 13, une belle soirée québécoise

Andrée, Claude
Linda, Richard,
Jacques, Sylvie-Anne
Lynn, Georges
et Mireille, particulierement Mireille

Champagne et encore du champagne..
Une joue avec des mots et des personnages québécois...
Nombreux toasts, santé,santé,santé!
Et juste avant minuit nous avons réuni pour chanter Mon Pays, et puis... dix, neuf, huit,sept, six, cinq, quatre, trois, deux, un!!!
Bonne Année! Les bisous, amitié

Après, la nourriture et nous avons regardé  Bye, Bye 2012...très comique. Justin Trudeau dans la douche, quelques anciennes ministres d'éducation, emprisionnés, qui faisent des carrés rouges!

J'étais très fatigué de concentrer sur une autre langue pendant cinq heures. Nous sommes partis avec encore de bisous et souhaites. Déhors, plus de neige, douce, mousseux.

Je suis restée chez Mireille pour commencer la nouvelle année avec elle et Guy, mes merveilleux amis  québécois.

Violence and art

ACP today, the last of 2012, included what will be a subject we address in the new year, I hope. Violence, art? While we did not quite capture the thoughts that were flying through our heads, I later found a link between Kurt Vonnegut's view(expressed in an interview on CBC's The Current) that we humans don't deserve life, and some of the films, tv shows we mentioned, wherein people kill each other so graphically, casually, it is as if life does not even come into it. A big, complex subject. In some ways art counterbalances violence, and yet...

Presto knocking


A move, un rhume, an exam, Christmas.. but last night as I was falling asleep, I heard a familiar  knock, light if insistent. Almost time to return to Presto. Eager to. But the beauty here, Annie's imminent arrival, quelques fêtes de Noel... soon, bientôt, I will open the door.

via via

30 novembre

En train, de Québec à Montréal. Quelle belle journée. Un peu de neige parterre, mais beaucoup de soleil et un ciel d'un bleu parfait.  J'adore le train.


Two hours west of Montreal, following the St. Lawrence seaway, but on land. A ways back I saw a freighter rising above a field of ochre grass that looked so soft from this distance. Less snow, greyer skies. My seat mate a young woman who is teaching herself to knit. Many people dozing, many other working or watching their screens of various sizes.

3 december

Le retour, after a few good days with my daughter. A longer ride from Toronto, an older car, the seats more uncomfortable. A pleasant woman on her way to Montreal, where she has been working temporarily, for three years now. Her family lives in Guelph. We avoid much talking but share the space easily. More talk as we appraoch Montreal. She describes the cruise she will take with her family over the holidays.Past travels.A woman from the Caribbean.
A tasty shish taouk à la gare, then the more comfortable ride à Québec. J'adore le train.

Jack Kerouac/Quebec

Such wonderful passion in the words the music and the performances Thursday night at the Musée National de Beaux Arts.http://www.jazzaquebec.ca/ Again that identity/language theme.  Kerouac's family was part of the migration of Québecois  to states like Maine and Massachusetts, people seeing work and finding it in textile mills, factories.

Normand Guilbeault,http://normandguilbeault.com/ described as a vrai kerouackian, created a show - Visions of Kerouac, that included his quartet, with himself on stand-up bass, the words of Kerouac and Patrice Desbiens, visual collages on the backdrop --including images from Kerouac's life, and a terrific actor, Nicolas Landré http://www.nicolaslandre.com/nl.html who read, spoke, scatted, sang. What a talented, committed bunch. And drinks! Mexico City blues containing a melange of unlikely ingredients, very alcoholic except for the shot of orange juice and the shot... bien sûr.. de sirop d'érable. Started with a letter Kerouac, Ti-Jean, wrote to a Québec newspaper, in which he was thankful for an insightful review and apologetic for his inability to write good French. And ended with a song that everyone in the audience knew, except for me.

Normand G shaped the show around the longing for identity, and, to me, the sustaining chord was the connection with language. Language, the house where you live.