Skip to main content

Culture invaded

Starting out in Ottawa--not my first time away from home, but the first time truly living far away from where I was born with no chance of going home without considerable expense in terms of my career and anyway I couldn't support such a plan with my pocket book--I wrote home to my undergraduate honours thesis supervisor that I was homesick in the worst way.  He replied by telling me to read Thomas Wolfe, not the author of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but a book with the inconsolate title You Can't Go Home Again.  This was the beginning of book ending things I couldn't understand with cranial looking stops made of petrified wood.
Image result for carved petrified wood bookendsImage result for thomas wolfe you can't go home againImage result for flak catcherRadical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.
I think I got the basic concept--and tried to think how I brought home with me in my heart when I moved and could return to its real comforts anytime, but somehow the dressed stone of Canada's neo-gothic capital were nothing like the Rockies, and culture invaded, the way nature had for Auden in Oxford.
Related imageImage result for WH auden nature invadesRelated image
When Barry Cooper's medicine was too hard to swallow, I turned to his pupil, Tom Darby, who told me to try Look Homeward Angel, also by Wolfe.  I was to trade Barry's ironic detachment or double vision for Darby's thinly veiled bravado, which sounded like Hemingway.  Listen to Wolfe, Darby bade me.  He wrote standing up, writing on top of his fridge.  Pusillanimous Hemingway said the only engagement that matters to a writer is the engagement of his rear end with the chair he is sitting in when he's working and that of his fingers with the keys of the typewriter, remembering also that you can't fight 15 rounds on your ass.  That's what I was told.  And so I carried the emblematic image of a carved stone angel atop some forgotten grave and tried desperately to hold on to the home I carried inside me.
Image result for look homeward angelRelated image
Thank goodness for Boushey's and snow peas and an early away from home Christmas dinner of baked salmon made by a partisan and a supporter of Joe Clark's.  High River was close to home after all, and occasionally there was a lesson rolled into my typewriter after I went home for the night signed Joe.
Image result for bousheys ottawaImage result for joe clark in house of commonsImage result for joe clark
And so I fetched newspapers from the Chateau Laurier and chocolate cookies from the East Block cafeteria--the raw materials for his breakfast benediction--for Mr. Clark, and learned not to pass bureaucratic excuses on to constituents and fight like a gunslinger, without even the proper training for it.
Image result for joe clark in house of commons debateImage result for joe clark house of commonsImage result for gunslinger gunsmokeImage result for ibm selectric paper rolled in

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Animals and aliens

When you think of Orwell's Animal Farm , you get stuck on the idea of some being more equal than others.  But world peace, galactic harmony, the celebration of diversity and the active practice of inclusion are all achieved in science fiction by casting minorities in the role of animals and aliens.  Star Trek comes to mind in this regard, where even hippies were disposed of, Federation style, as sensitive dissenting aliens, not forgetting Spock with his pointy ears!  And then there were Wookiees, still man's best friend. Viewing animals as humans--anthropomorphizing--or treating different races as aliens, all of this is shape shifting.  This shape is my shade, there where I used to stand--that's Steely Dan.

Of course she's not a true red

As the parent of a "ginger", and having red heads on both sides of the family, and having married into two Irish families, I know first hand that ginger covers the whole spectrum from strawberry blonde (to my way of thinking a classic ginger!), to orange (carrot tops), to a real rust red (what my father in law would call a true red).  When Pat Todkill first set eyes on his granddaughter, he remarked, "Of course, she's not a true red".  For one thing, Emily the Elder lacked freckles on her face and upper body.  For another, she really was and is a strawberry blonde. A further observation.  Even people with the raven blackest hair have rust red lights--caveman red, soot covered ochre if you like.  Woolly mammoth red.  Sometimes it takes just the right light to pick out the smoldering ember, but beard and eyebrows tend to incorporate the tell tale ginger strain, like chili pepper in a spice jar of mixed pepper corns. And, of course, brunette...

Things always end in the Summer

In the middle of the second major heatwave of the season, the City cut the wildflowers along the footpath.  I mean they cut everything 30 inches on either side of the pavement, but since the flowers were my friends, all I saw was that they cut the flowers, even though they actually mowed indiscriminately.  And it must have been a chore for the labourer in this heat, so his feet were heavy when he made hay of the prettiest parts of the Summer.  But I can't get to that right now; I'm still reeling from the loss of chicory, and the other pinks and yellows and blues whose names I was just beginning to learn. "Program, get your program", I heard the barker call on my way to the bleachers.  I turned once and caught his eye, and looked at the program in his hand and back into his eyes--all the while his eyes following mine--but then he looked back to his hand, and again into my eyes and he said "You can't tell the player without a card"! Did it matter that ...