A Gatsby-esque Twelfth Night

Imagine a meeting between F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Shakespeare. Hey, I've got an idea, says Will. Let's transport my popular English comedy Twelfth Night to the site of your American tragedy. The decadence of  West Egg ( Long Island) and the class consciousness of its residents are perfect for my characters, who are, most of them, titled, and not above the kind of cruelty latent in Tom Buchanan. And it's all about mistaken identity, too, or at least people pretending to be someone they are not.

In this summer of The Great Gatsby, I found it odd that the director of Bard on the Beach's Twelfth Night, Dennis Garnhum, apparently should ignore the popularity of the movie and the revival of Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, and instead invite the audience to imagine that it was 1913 and Viola had been shipwrecked at a European Spa, called Illyria. All those men in light coloured suits, the drinking, carousing. Are they trying to say something about Gatsby I wondered, shortly into Act 1. Is Feste the Nick Carraway-type character? But wait, weren't the women's dresses wrong for the jazz age, and, and...

I know that theatre folk are always looking for new ways of presenting Shakespeare, but here the choice seemed less than well thought out. With setting and costumes so obviously referential, the production would have been served by making better plot or thematic use of the implications. It might be done without altering the script. On the other hand, why not a different setting altogether? Still, it was a very enjoyable production with a wonderful performance, as usual, by the multi-talented Jonathan Young as Feste, the wise fool, and also by the newcomer Rachel Cairns, who played a convincing Viola. I loved the scene just before intermission, when each principal character crosses the stage by him or herself, pausing for barely a beat, before striding down one of the tunnels to offstage. We knew what each was thinking, though no one said a word. Of course on the main stage, the backdrop open to a sea/mountain view of Vancouver is always the star of the show.

Daunted, haunted

In this still new territory of epublishing, I raise a finger to the wind and have to work to keep myself standing in a hurricane of possibilities: best blog sites, how to market your book, the most successful this, the most effective that. Websites, social media advice, instructional youtube videos. Numbers, numbers. The literary fiction sites that seem not to include actual literary fiction. Of course there are also quite informative blogs and sites. I like the sites for readers, the online book clubs, such as Goodreads and others less well known. Reassuring for a writer to know that so many people like to read. Interesting to read their opinions of various books.

Meantime, I'm travelling the old routes of promotion, preparing a talk to deliver at libraries across the country, beginning with our local library later this month. Haunted by memories of beginning the Shinny story, in that little trailer where I escaped to work, writing in long hand and on a portable typewriter, using yellow newsprint. The roaring White Salmon river. Since the mid to late 80's, when I started thinking about the character who became Shinny,  single mothers are no longer considered sluts and welfare cheats. Banks give loans to single mothers, employers don't consider them a bad risk. Many women choose to have children but not to marry.

 I have matured as a writer, too, become more ambitious in theme and design. That began with the second novel, Flashing Yellow. This weekend I found some old tractor feed paper from the time I was writing FY, with handwritten notes on sonatas and string quartets, in the drawer of a small desk I seldom use. Flashing Yellow has four themes, love, death, truth and money, and is divided into four parts. I aimed towards the reflection of a musical form. In my notes on the sonata, I see that it is so like the arc of a story, the beginning exposition, the transition, the recapitulation of the first part, but with changed harmonies.
 
From yellow newsprint to tractor feed to books delivered by whispernet. From the threat of an obscene caller, to a poison oak infection, to Shinny's suspicion that her boss might be involved with terrorists. Discordance resolves as conditions and characters change.


"Perfection means hitting exactly what you are aiming at and not touching by a hair what you are not." John Gardner




Raskolnikov's internal Siberia

I heard on the CBC radio 2 program Shift recently that Rachmaninoff was always thinking about death and that is why the Dies Irae, the chant used in the requiem mass, is so often a part of his work. In the Dies Irae text, the saved will be delivered and the unsaved damned. Just as watching the adaptation of a Trollope novel enhanced my view of  the antisemitism in Crime and Punishment, the music of Rachmaninoff, in, for example, Isle of the Dead, though written nearly 30 years after Dostoevsky's death, seems the perfect score to that narrative. That and the second piano concerto, so different, but both pieces sad, both passionate. It's what I love about Russian novels and Russian music.

Other notes on C and P, from a writer's point of view. The long passages of dialogue. Seldom a clipped exchange, but veritable speeches as one character unveils himself to another.

The brilliant creation of narrative tension by witholding information. Although Raskolnikov murders the old woman pawnbroker on page 77 of my copy, he is not officially arrested for the crime until page 531. He ends up in Siberia, but the punishment begins almost immediately after the murder as he suffers with doubt, tortures himself with reflection, both attracts and alienates people around him.

I read that Dostoevsky was one of the first writers to employ multiple points of view in a novel and for that I thank him. How narrow a world can appear when seen through only one pair of eyes.

I see, sadly, that the impoverished conditions in which writers live were the same then as now.

Emory replies

Read your blog with deep interest. Was happy to read the Wiki-excerpt. It prompted me to re-investigate the debate to see where, and if, I went off the rails in my beliefs. After perusing the texts below, I have to conclude, as in all things, the matter is a complicated one. Mr. Dostoevsky was certainly a product of his times and his place, and his insights and affirmations on the forces most threatening to the peoples and the society he loved seemed to have been influenced and, in no small measure, by his nations' most entrenched and popular prejudices against the Jews. That there were bigger bigots and jerks making great art in that same period, does not excuse an artist, endowed with such literary power and such intellectual gifts, from using his art to give those shits a sharp smack in the nose for all the world to see -- as Nietzsche did to his once beloved-mentor, the rabid anti-Semite Wagner.
Loved the blog, though. Here are some of the texts I found on the discussion you raised.

LINKS




4] Here's a link to an obit for a renowned Dostoevsky scholar who struggled with the writer's views on race -- skip to the penultimate paragraph...


All the best,

Emory

"You vile Prussian chicken leg in a crinoline!"

I re-read Crime and Punishment partially because my artchatpodcast buddy Emory Holmes II had mentioned that, despite his brilliance, Dostoevsky was a bigot, particularly an anti-Semite. I did not remember that. I did remember being very affected as a young woman by the speech of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, a call to personal responsibility I thought then. I also remembered reading The Idiot one summer on the beach, Spanish Banks in Vancouver.

So in my re-read, I was on the lookout for bigotry. I did not find too much explicit antisemitism, but there were three instances. In the first, Razumihkin, a poor intellectual who is devoted to Raskolnikov and in love with his sister, Dunya, describes Luzhin, the man who wants to marry Dunya as "not a man of our kind. Not because he came with his hair curled by a hairdresser, not because he was in a hurry to show off his intelligence, but because he's a stool pigeon and a speculator; because he's a Jew and a mountebank, and it shows."

In the second instance, the so-described character, Luzhin, who tried to seduce his intended with money, asks himself, "Devil take it, why did I turn into such a Jew?"

In the third obvious instance, near the end, a soldier named Achilles watches the approach of the spurned Svidrigailov (another hopeful re Raskolnikov's sister Dunya). "His face bore that expression of eternal, grumbling sorrow that is so sourly imprinted upon all faces of the Jewish tribe without exception."

During the same period in which I was reading Crime and Punishment, I watched a BBC series, "The Way We Live Now," based on an Anthony Trollope novel. Antisemitism was addressed through the character of a girl desperate to marry, and not uninterested in the advances of a pleasant Jewish banker, until she learned that while he might be able to solve her family's money problems, he expected her to mother what she called "his Jew children". To me Trollope's own attitude was clear in that he made the Jewish character more likeable than the characters who wanted to associate with him only for his money.

In Dostoevsky it is less clear. Raskolnikov is such an idealist. It's one reason for his crime in the first place. He abhors the way pawn brokers exploit the poor. Yet, both the sympathetic (Razumihkin) and the non-sympathetic characters utter statements that expose their antisemitism.

The Wikipedia article on Dostoevsky states:
"He supported equal rights for the Russian Jewish population, which was an unpopular position in Russia. He stated that he did not hate Jewish people and was not antisemitic. He claimed that Jews might exert a negative influence, but he advised the Tsar to allow them to occupy influential positions such as university professorships. The antisemitism label does not reflect his expressed desire to reconcile Jews and Christians peacefully in a universal brotherhood of mankind."

Interestingly, Dostoevsky and Trollope were contemporaries. Dostoyevsky died in 1881, the start of the pogroms in Russia, and Trollope died in 1882, before Jewish refugees fleeing Russia settled in England and competition for space and work fostered the kind of bigotry that typically arises in such situations.

As for Crime and Punishment, however, the worst insult in the book may be the one Katarina Ivanovna directs to her landlady, Amalia, who, confusingly, has the same surname. Ah the names in Russian novels!

"You vile Prussian chicken leg in a crinoline!" shouts Katarina to Amalia, a German immigrant. Shortly after, the raving Katarina dies of consumption.


Back to the book

I am a lifelong writer who has entered the world of digital publishing. In some ways it feels like leaving home, saying goodbye to Mom and Dad, the publishers who managed the jobs I am doing now, and striking out on my own. As with any big move, there is much to think about.

My book Shinny's Girls, the Trilogy has been available on Amazon for almost a month. I was excited to let friends and associates know about it and pleased to receive many notes of congratulations. I liked hearing that some readers were getting caught up in the story. But I had signed onto the Kindle Select program, which means that until the end of September the book will be available only to Kindle users and users of Ipads and Iphones, and in the case of the latter two, the print is still appearing in bold italics, which one reader/friend says she does not mind; but it is not supposed to be that way. Ah, doubts. Maybe I should have stayed home, if they would have had me; Mom and Dad, that is.

There is also the lingering stigma attached to self-publishing, the echo of vanity presses and the fact that anyone can publish almost anything electronically now. We traditionalists wonder how quality can be maintained, yet non-traditionalists are less worried. No one has to read a bad book. The gatekeepers, publishers, what did they know anyway? And were they any better at finding readers that I can/will be? One positive is that, like a grown-up, I am not waiting for approval from the gate keepers but have enough confidence to present my work myself. Really, this route is not so new. Even Dostoyevsky self-published, through his press the Dostoyevsky Publishing Company.

More issues arise. My friend Julie wants chapter breaks. She is a serious, traditional reader who enjoys ereading, but prefers ebooks that are more like physical books, with page numbers to show her where she is in the book, and chapter headings to divide up a long read. To me, clear chapters are a stylistic choice; at present I have a running narrative with only lines and spaces dividing the voices of different characters, different scenes. I have four sections in Flashing Yellow, three sections in the lengthier You Again. In the next iteration, I will put these on the Contents page, with links, so that readers can encounter the novels that way. Maybe it is something that digital publishing demands.

And then of course there is promotion. How will browsers on Amazon ever find Shinny's Girls, the Trilogy among the hundreds of thousands of offerings? I can notify friends and ask that they notify their friends. I can especially target other writers and people in the book business, book club members. I should be practical about the necessity of promotion, but after a lifetime in which one of the worst things a person could be accused of was doing something just to get attention (the voices of brothers and sisters clamour in memory), I have to find the right way to balance my private self with the public self required to do these things. My godson Jimmy says it doesn't matter. People tweet their hearts out knowing that recipients will just forget what they read in the flood of other tweets, posts, emails, texts.



The House of Decisions

Vague, fluid, as dreams are, but this much I remember: In New York City, on a bus to the airport, a weird bus, more like a bullet train. I did not want to go to the airport, but to an area between the East and West Village where there were some shops offering interesting food. I have dreamt of this place before. I was able to get off the bus/train before it left Manhattan, found myself in an open field of tall grass. A derelict building stood nearby. A brick building with a door sill about a foot or so above the ground, as in the older parts of Quebec City and other cities that must contend with deep snow. In the distance stood a big water tank covered with indecipherable grafitti. Approaching the building I saw a wooden sign over the door on the side, The House of Decisions. I pushed at the door and it opened to an empty room lit by sunlight from a window opposite. I thought of one of my sisters, the one who laments her indecisiveness. What a comical place for a photo of her, beneath that sign. But just as I was about to call her from wherever in my subconscious she resides, the scene turned to an art installation with a bald headed man sitting on a chair in front of the house, and well dressed people approaching from the field.

Hmm. An illusion that there exists a concrete place to go to determine the right course, the answer to our conundrums? Or did the building appear derelict and empty because decisions are ephemeral, only spaces we have passed through, brightened by the glare of impermanence.

Hurricane Annie

Annie and Shane, the morning after making landfall near midnight.
 
I call my younger daughter Hurricane Annie because she stirs things up wherever she goes. Someone who expects the most from every experience and not only expects it but makes it happen. Hiking, biking, swimming, drinking, laughing with friends, hugging niece and nephew and any baby or dog present; especially happy with Shane, a good match. Planning, planning. A busy brain. From Toronto via Gibsons to the West Coast Trail http://www.westcoasttrailbc.com/ Happy travels you two; I miss you already.

What now?

Ta-da!
Shinny's Girls, the trilogy is now available to e-readers!

It is finished, yet does not feel complete, so I ask, what now? In the past when I have published a book, a package arrives in the mail - the author's copies - and the pleasure of fruition is sensual, the smell of the newly printed book, the feel of the smooth cover, sometimes even a slight crackle as the top copy pulls away from the one just beneath. This time, my first experience with e publishing, it was a matter of pressing the Save and Publish button on the Kindle Direct site, and waiting 12 hours for the book to be vetted (however mysteriously that is accomplished) before seeing the book cover, blurb and ordering information appear on the Amazon site. A little anti-climatic, if still satisfying to have come to this point in the long creation of this volume.
       I found out the hard way that one must meticulously follow every step in the formatting guide, rather than winging it more or less logically to achieve the same end, in this case, indents. After the first attempt I made with the aid of my mentor Steve Harlow, I discovered that although I thought I had formatted correctly, manual tabbing was not acceptable, so I spent a day and a half manually removing all the tabs and creating first line indents for the whole document via the paragraph menu.
     At this point, if this were a paper book, the publisher would be sending it to newspapers, magazines and broadcasters for reviews. There would be a book launch, possibly a tour, readings, signings. I would register my new title in the Public Lending Right program and with Access Copyright. It might be nominated for a literary prize. (Is there one for perseverance?)
      Over the next several months I will discover more about the next steps, have some answers for the "what now?" But as of this week, my feet are officially wet.
 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DKCZKFU

Oh no!

Today, the 2013 summer solstice, was to be P or publishing day. We were ready. Text complete, edited, formatted according to Kindle guidelines. Steve's cover design approved and appreciated all round. Only thing remaining, to upload it all onto the Kindle Select site.

Steve (Stephen (p0ps) Harlow) and I connected by Skype at 9 to begin the process. Skype's screen sharing feature made it possible for us to discuss the various options on the My Book page. First problem was uploading the cover in Tiff. Not only did it take 20 minutes, but when it appeared, the colours were inverted. The lovely red came out turquoise and the off-white background of the drawing appeared in black. Steve soon figured out that the Jpeg would work better than Tiff, although Kindle declares that both are acceptable.

The big, yet-to-be-fixed problem was when we previewed contents. The indents were too long, also inconsistent. I had followed instructions for "Building" my book. The text appeared as it should have on David Zieroth's Kindle and on my computer. Hmm. Steve is going to follow a tutorial he found, by a guy who had similar problems with Kindle and so used a different method. We will see what comes next.

And so today is not P day after all. But it is still the first day of summer, and I will celebrate by taking my first swim in the sea this year.

My blurb

 ...as follows:

    In the spirit of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, Shinny’s Girls, the Trilogy reveals a social history of our times by presenting the life of what critics have called “an uncommon common woman” and her family of three daughters over two decades, with each linked novel – Shinny’s Girls, Flashing Yellow and You Again - covering a single year. Through the threat of an obscene caller in the first novel, to the revelation of a long kept secret in the third, the girls gradually leave home in Vancouver for Milan, New York and a goat farm in the redwoods of Northern California, and Shinny’s world opens to experiences she would never have foreseen, including a white water rafting adventure that sparks a mid-life love affair; an email correspondence with a soldier stationed in Afghanistan, and her unintentional complicity with an identity thief who happens to be her grandson.

 
     Described as “fast paced and funny, and a pleasure to read,” the late CBC radio icon Peter Gzowski admitted that Shinny had hooked him. “I stayed up until the wee hours to finish it (the original novella). You get a real sense of the reality of the lives of these people.”
            Books in Canada: “A superb novella, Shinny's Girls demonstrates a large, robust talent, nicely matured.”
            Calgary Herald: “compelling and memorable.”
            Toronto Star: “…a strong collection by a considerable talent.”



Almost finished now. This ebook should be ready to upload to Amazon Select within a week!
 

The Neighbours: a memory

After Jim died that fall, we scattered his ashes in the garden and around the blue cabin above the river. Then we had to drive north, back to work, to school. In the shock and the sadness, no time to think of what do do with the cabin and all his things. I returned in winter, drove past brown fields whitened with hoar frost,  took what we would not have wanted to lose and hoped that the place would just sleep there above the river, among the big trees, such an obscure driveway into the property that even we had to concentrate so not to miss it. Yet various friends stopped by and, seeing the ashes, scooped some up to keep with them. 
     It was not until spring, March, that we were able to return and stay and seriously sort through everything and make decisions. A friend introduced me to the caretaker we needed, Doug, who, after mending the water pump that had frozen and then cracked, refused to accept pay. "Let's write it in the dust and let the rain settle it," he said.
     The neighbours lived across the creek. A bigger, more open property, further back from the river and cleared to a greater extent, more conventionally developed with a big garage and workshop for the various machinery loggers need, a tidy frame house with a front porch and a doorbell, which we rang. Late morning. Loretta let us in. I apologized, because I had not considered that they might be eating lunch, but of course they were. A glass of milk at each place, with a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich cut in triangles on each luncheon plate. A flowery table cloth in brown tones. The kitchen orderly, neat. No sign that bacon had recently fried on the stove.
     "What happened?" were Larry's first words. A tanned face, round, closely shaved. Crew cut white hair, blue eyes,  straight, thin-lipped mouth that did not smile. He wore a black and white striped denim work shirt, thick socks. Loretta's glasses were attached to a chain around her neck.
     I described the accident, apologized for not having visited sooner, explained the circumstances, all of which they knew or had read about, or guessed. What they did not know was that saying the news cemented the truth of it. Each utterance thudded like the diminishing bounces of a basketball before it rolls to rest. Dead, dead, dead.




So much for being "on time"

Broadcasts can be saved to listen to as podcasts, whenever I want. People with sophisticated TV's have the option of delaying programs. The sense of anticipation as news time approaches is a thing of the past. We don't all see whatever evening news we like at the same hour, or even in the evening. This is both convenient and somehow disappointing.
      Of course one still has to be "on time" for live events. I can still enjoy moments of anticipation before the lights go down and the curtain goes up, before the concert master precedes the conductor onto the stage.
      Geoffrey Smedley says,  Time is paint without pigment. Einstein said, time is a persistent illusion. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote:
     ‘Time passes.’ ‘That’s how it goes,’ Úrsula said, ‘but not so much.’ When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle


     Oola said, "Grandma, you're too deep; you should get out of your heart and into your eyes."

All the decisions are mine

And that's a little frightening. With Shinny's Girls, the Trilogy, nearing e-publication, I have to decide on front pages, back pages, then configure them properly so that the type is centered,  the page design is appropriate, that I have included the right information. Did I suggest the best image to Steve for the cover art? Am I hurrying through the returned copy edit? Have I missed anything? Can I follow instructions correctly to register the ISBN with the Canadian archives?

Have yet to write the perfect blurb, a paragraph that will entice readers to choose Shinny's Girls. "Not since Mrs. Bennett has there been such a mother of a family of girls..." But Shinny has little in common with Elizabeth Bennett's mother in Pride and Prejudice; it's a different time. Shinny does not wear bonnets, she is impulsive, her choices are seldom deliberate but are driven by circumstance. Instead of conforming to the mores of her "time,"  the times catch up with her. 

Hmm.

Yes, self-publishing an e-book is relatively easy, but I appreciate the skills of the publishing professionals who produced the first two novels of the trilogy in print, in 1989 and 2001. While I am learning a lot as I use my morning hours to complete this process, an ever-expanding part of my brain is anticipating the new notebook I buy at the start of each project, the delicious stage of prodding an idea to see if it has any life. Soon.

Status Report

Dark Saturday. The Coast teases with days when it is the most beautiful place on earth, and then some, like today, when only a slight change from black to grey and the calls of birds announce morning. I turn on lamps and light candles.

Idling between projects feels odd to me. The Shinny's Girls Trilogy will soon be back from copy editing, ISBN's applied for, a general plan, with Steve, who will soon supply the cover art. Still aiming to have it available on-line by June 21. Print on demand too? Hmm. The Trilogy amounts to 210, 000 words, which may work out to 600 plus pages. According to Lulu's calculator, I would have to charge about 35.00 retail for the book, to cover costs and fees. Worth it? I do love paper books, flipping pages, the feel of various textures, the look of various print-styles. The sense of progression.
      Meantime, David Zieroth is reading Presto! while travelling in Europe. He downloaded my latest draft to his e-reader. First reports positive, enthusiastic. He called from Grosz to say,  "I am quite enjoying it!" But he has not finished it yet, and on the e-reader he doesn't know how far he has to go. Not like reading a paper book when there would be more pages on the left than on the right,  making it hard to read at lunch because of the imbalance, looking around for something - maybe a salt shaker - to anchor the right side while you hold your sandwich.
     Idling between projects, the rain is light enough I can go for a walk.



What's the Story? Geoffrey Smedley Part 2

I thought he was 85, but he is 86 and one-quarter, he reminded, with the precision typical of this intellectually rigourous man. That in itself is a story. No lying back for this artist.

The other thing is that he makes his art in a studio on Gambier Island, which is accessible only by passenger ferry or private boat from Vancouver or Gibsons. There are a few gravel roads, and some of the 150 or so permanent residents barge over vehicles to drive them, but nothing is simple when you live on an island. It requires desire and determination to brings things on or get things off. That's another big part of the story.

And I haven't yet introduced the work itself, 20 years in the making, an electro-
mechanical sculpture in four pieces, collectively called "Dissections," it is a literal interpretation of Descartes' view of man as a collection of mechanical parts. Each of Geoffrey Smedley's pieces are one of the organs of the character he calls Descartes' Clown, the last robot on earth.  

"Like Descartes, the Clown is neurotic. Each call into question their existence and non-existence, " he writes. "....The Clown removes the pineal gland Descartes thought the foyer to the immortal soul, the agent of life, and asks, is it here I shall find truth? It is the intuition that truth lies beneath that propels the robot to dissect himself."

Those passages come from a book that accompanies the work, which will be exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture beginning June 6. The book is also called Dissections, white on black, featuring 100 fragments Geoffrey photographed himself, and facing-page texts that are as thoughtful as they are, often, hilarious, which comment on the metaphorical implications of each part. Much of the text is narrated by the Clown/robot himself. Not yet halfway through, I have found enough quotable lines to keep me tweeting for months (once I open an account.)

Because I think people have to know about this man, his vision, his commitment, his intellect, his skill as a machinist (he tooled all the parts himself, in his Gambier Island workshop), his sense of artistic elegance, his wife Brigid, who is dealing with a second bout of cancer, the Herculean effort it took to get the pieces into 12 crates weighing several tons onto a barge, then into a truck for the ferry across to Vancouver and the 4500
km journey to Montreal. The crates are on their way. Geoffrey and Brigid will follow in a couple of weeks. The story will continue.

Jimmy and George

He moved to Roberts Creek, imagining himself in a cabin in the woods, plenty of time to read, to write, to think, to practice piano.  Anticipating loneliness,  he imagined a dog, even chose one from a shelter in Vancouver. But when the young attendant there suggested that he should take time off work to bond with the dog, he realized it might not be the right time for such a commitment. For one thing, he had just started the job.

Still, he wanted a companion. Already he felt the enormity of the forest surrounding his cabin. Heard the creaking of giant trees in the storm, the shifting of logs in the cabin itself. And there were mice.

George was a two-year old stray from northern BC. A fluffy, golden-eyed ginger Tom. Jimmy bought the cat box, the cat food. Agreed to keep George inside for two weeks, to ground him, and did so, though George sat worshipful at the cat door, as if it were an altar, Jimmy said. Peed on the carpet one day; to show his annoyance, Jimmy wondered? Caught mice, but did not finish the job. Preferred to sit alongside Jimmy while he read, or wrote, or played the piano. The mice were aware of George, though, and skittered nervously along once-safe pathways through the kitchen. Maybe his presence alone would be enough.

The weekend of George's parole happened to fall on a beautiful spring day. Jimmy tied a shoelace to George's collar, brought him out to the deck to enjoy the sun, smiled at George's confusion, then untied the shoelace. George was free! He padded through the garden, his little bell lightly jingling, returned to the porch, then, braver, began to explore the terrain of high grass and rock, and tree roots he had been gazing out towards for two weeks. When Jimmy called, he searched and found no sign of that proud ginger plume that had risen above the tall grass as George stalked, perhaps, insects. He ran to the neighbour's house, where a dog barked. Perhaps a dog that had seen or smelled George. Nothing. Would this be it then?

Having returned, worried,  he knelt down on the path that leads
from the gravel road beyond the cedars to the front deck of the cabin, this young man, not much more than a boy, and called again, and George came running, his little bell jingling, right into Jimmy's arms. The dream, if modified, intact.

The Strength of Materials

 This is a sound poem based on the work and the workshop of Geoffrey Smedley, who has recently completed his massive "Descartes Clown," a four-piece electro-mechanical creation weighing several tons that will be exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
( It's fun to read aloud if you like the sound of words and the images suggested by them.)


The Strength of Materials

Words and sounds from Geoffrey Smedley 
Arranged by Mary Burns


Centre drills, end mills
Angle plates, allen keys
Facing cutters
Feeder gauges

Five-speed heavy drill press

Boring bar
Knurling tool
Brass tock
Shim stock
Step blocks
Gaskets

The Spindle of Necessity
The Penetrated Cross
The scriber Mr. Perryman made to pass his trade test
The Greater Ptolemaic Cams

Draw bar
Diving head
Deburring tool
Centre drill, clearance drills, jabbing drills

The undercroft
Connectors
Argon arc
Corner features
Creode Cone
Character Rod

A small anvil
A large anvil
Parallelogram linkage with counter weights.


Nuts
Bolts
Screws
Brass
Steel
Aluminum

The geometry of more than one centre

Shear and Brake
Brake and Roll
Taps and dies
Feeds and stops

Milling machine
Mortising machine
Metaphorical machine
Memory machine…. I don’t have names for the parts


The Prime Mover


The Inhibitors, an eject
Feed shaft shift
Face plate
Feeder guages
Inclining angle plate

Escapement mechanism
The Theatre of Will

Number punches
Letter punches
Palate-inhibited strob wheel

The Trigger of Chance
Necessity
The Ejaculator
Vomitoria


Vernia calipers
Odd leg calipers
Medieval escapement
The Pulse

Abrasive wheels, angle grinders


Lead screw
Screw-cutting lathe
The Seed of Intention
The Tabernacle
The mow shaft turns, the feed shaft turns

In death the robot needs to know what it is

Three jaw chuck, four jaw chuck
Colletts
Diving head for collets
Rotary tables, xy table
Thread gauges, feeder gauges, ball gauges, Arkansas slip


Pin vice
Studs
Nuts
Clamps

Bubbles of Glass

Oxyacetylene
Thread dial indicator
Counters


The Bearings


The Brass Bound Followers

Layshaft
Gantry
Draw bar
Canede otto drilling machine

Power is provided by gravity
The Foundation of the Inner Horizon


Two sources of Movement
The Dante Wheel
Radial limit switch interfaces with the sequence


The Sisyphus Pipe
Swarf

Air extraction/dust extraction

A 20 ton hydraulic press
A 2 inch hack sawing machine
A horizontal band saw, a vertical band saw

The Inhibitors

The Paten

Carving mallet
Thickness planes

Swarf

The Plane of Grace

Swarf

The Gland Wires

Swarf

Cross-slide, mandrell
Adhesive sealing strip, files, wrenches, wire cutters

Cast iron series
Rod tube sectors
Free cutting steel rods


The Rising Beam

The Table

Sectional saw blades.

The Scissors

The results of an autopsy conducted by the last robot on earth.