Archive for March 2012
The peeling letters on the awning indicate that even the owners didn't care about this place.
The Indigo Spirit store in Mount Royal Village has closed and few will mourn its passing. It’s hard to say now if it was a matter or arrogance or ignorance, probably a bit of both, that put landed the country’s biggest chain of bookstores, where they presumably know what they’re doing, in one of the best locations in Calgary and yet managed to fail and fail miserably. And so now they are packing up the last of their remainder books and stealing away. The beast is dead and it died not even with a whimper.
A few blocks to the south of Mount Royal Village – which, it must be noted, seems to have some sort of curse on it, as it seems to be a magnet for failing enterprises – is one of Canada’s (ie, the world’s) wealthiest and most literate neighbourhoods. All around MRV to the north, east and west are apartments filled with students, artists, seniors, in general people who like to read. One block west is Caffe Beano, one of Calgary’s most literary cafes, certainly the only one with two poetry anthologies to its credit.
Had anyone from Indigo ever bothered to sit in Caffe Beano for a few hours and check out what we were all reading, they might have fashioned a more relevant inventory and sold a few more books. Instead, it came to be known as the book store that had absolutely no books in it of interest to anyone. It was worse than what you might expect to find in a far flung suburban mall at the end of the earth.
All that said, this is no great victory, it’s just a regrettable failure. I have to admit I managed to find a few books there over the years, most notably one of my all time faves, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. One of the clerks at Indigo, Blair, who became a friend over the years bought a copy for himself and we bonded on that. With the closing of the store, Blair is running back to Saskatoon, apparently having had enough of cowtown. The staff was great and I wish them all the best of luck. They were involved with a doomed enterprise and they all knew it, but they soldiered on.
And so Indigo Spirit is gone. Its passing will go without notice, other than this one. In the words of one of my favourite playwrights, Michael O’Brien: See ya. Hates to be ya.
Shelf Life at the corner of 4th Street and 13th Avenue SW: open for business.
All is not lost in the hood, however, as for the past few years we have been blessed with a truly wonderful independent book store, Shelf Life Books (a link can be found on the left hand side of this page).
Shelf Life is for those of us who live on the south side of the Bow River what Pages in Kensington is for those on the north side. (This isn’t an absolute, obviously. Most of us who have the book habit frequent both places quite happily.) Here the inventory matches the sensibilities of the people in the neighbourhood it is found in, just a few blocks east and a few blocks north of the now defunct Indigo.
Readings abound. Books are launched and prominently featured. Local authors (like me) can be found on the shelves (as it were). They take their place in our community seriously. In fact, just yesterday I popped in and spoke to Will, one of the owners, about launching my volume of poetry, Nocturnal Emissions, in the fall. No problem. I just have to finish writing it!
Last year when Robert Kroetsch passed away, an evening of readings and tributes was held, allowing those of us who knew Robert (he edited an anthology of short stories for Coteau Books which contains my first ever published work) some sense of closure.
In these uncertain times, these troubled times in the publishing world, when who in their right mind would open a book store, we celebrate the continuing presence of Shelf Life in our community.
So we lost one book store that had no connection to the neighbourhood it was located in, that showed no desire to get to know any of us; yet we retained a good locally-owned literary book store and cultural centre that constantly brings together the authors and book lovers who live and work in this part of town and beyond.
It’s another reminder to support our local businesses, our friends and our neighbours. Clearly this is exactly what is happening in South West Calgary. In this particular case, one can’t help but think that for once, the good guys won.
Someone said today is the first day of spring but I thought it was tomorrow. Not that today was tomorrow rather that the first day of spring was tomorrow. Lean in, lean in the wind is blowing and there is grit everywhere dust and dirt and grit the wind blowing it into your hair your mouth your eyes squinting into the weak sun the first day of spring or is it tomorrow? Tomorrow we may well ask is this today or was this yesterday this first day of spring with the wind blowing clenching our jaws shutting our eyes against the fine dust and grit blowing against you always it seems against you never with you well it swirls this wind lean in, lean in heading into spring today yes it must be or maybe tomorrow the sun too feeble to do much good the wind is cold the wind has bite it carries a fine grit with it lean in, lean in you’ll get there yet
Any writer worth his or her salt is aware of audience. You can write in your journal or on your shiny new MacBookPro but until you share what you’re writing with someone else, you haven’t completed the cycle and you’re not really writing. You need to share it. Even if it’s only an audience of one, like your husband or wife or creative writing instructor – until you’re prepared to share it, you’re not really a writer.
I was thinking of the nature of my own audience when I was looking through the origin of hits on this blog of mine this weekend. Now that I have learned how to figure this out on WordPress, I realize I have been miscalculating just who exactly has been reading these words. I assumed it would be people from Calgary, perhaps those who used to read my column in the Calgary Herald, or have seen my plays downtown, or my students, or my many Facebook friends.
Generally, that’s probably the case. And yet reviewing the origins of my hits today, I see I have had six hits so far: three from Turkey, one from Portugal (my daughter, Hanna) one from Canada and one from Taiwan. So clearly, I know nothing about my audience, about who is reading this, or why, and I am once again made to realize just how different the world is now from when I started out in my writing career.
My first encounter with an audience was with a small brave collection of souls who showed up at the old Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery at my Alma Mater, the University of Regina, to hear me read some of my poems on a cold and snowy night over 30 years ago. I don’t remember the circumstances of why I was even asked, I certainly hadn’t published anything, but there I was in with my mullet and my skinny tie reading some poems that have since been lost to the ages.
Terrifying, is all I remember about it. But at least I could see who was there. (And who wasn’t.)
(Making it all the worse, the old Norman MacKenzie Gallery was tucked in beside the Conservatory of Music at the U of R. I had just defected from the music faculty to become an English major. Of course, no one cared. But I hardly knew it that night!)
Around this time, a short story of mine was produced by the CBC and broadcast nationally. I remember being in Toronto and out for supper with some friends (the Campbell clan). We gathered around the radio and listened to my story being broadcast across the country. Who knows who even heard it? Maybe everybody! Maybe nobody. But I was certainly filled with a great sense of my own self-importance that night like I’ve probably never felt since. That night on the subway home, I felt like Pierre Burton or something. It’s hard to impress on readers of this blog at this point in time the importance of the CBC in the development of a writer’s career. The CBC! The production values! Sea to sea to sea! And the money was nothing to sneeze at, either!
That night on my way home, with the sonorous tones of the PROFESSIONAL ACTOR who had read my little story reverberating in my young brain, I clearly thought I was destined to greatness.
Suddenly the entire country was my audience. What could possibly stop me??
There followed a career in the theatre (which as far as I know is still ongoing). The blessing and the curse of the playwright is that you have no choice but to be very aware of your audience. You’re sitting right there with them as they experience your work of art. (Or in my case, pacing up and down at the back of the theatre, sweating it out.) You know if you’ve succeeded, that’s for sure. But even more acutely, you know if you’ve failed.
Public humiliation is never pleasant, and there’s no worse a feeling than to be sitting in the theatre when your play is going down like the Titanic despite the brave efforts of your cast.
Writing for a newspaper is interesting. My column in the Herald came out in the Saturday paper. I remember one of the early weeks, I found myself in a coffee shop watching a gentleman as he read the paper while drinking his morning coffee. I watched and waited. Finally he got to the Entertainment section. My heart raced. He got to the page my column appeared on, frowned, maybe even grimaced, then put the section aside and moved on to Sports. So much for that!
But I guess a few people read it over the years. Recently, I was stopped in the Co-op store by a little old lady who told me how much she loves the column and how she reads it every week. Well, I haven’t written in the Herald for a few years now, so I asked her if she was still reading it and she said, “Yes, every week. Wouldn’t miss it.” You can’t very well call a little old lady a dirty stinking liar so I didn’t press the issue. But you can see it makes it hard to know with any certainty just who is reading what.
And now this. This internet thing. I just checked my hits again and I have a new one, this one from Mexico. What gives with that? Am I on the verge of becoming an international sensation? Or are there simply people everywhere and anywhere who magically or accidentally hit the right buttons so that my blog suddenly appears on their computer screen? Don’t they have anything better to do? For that matter, don’t I? Maybe not . . . .
I really don’t know. I have to admit that I really don’t know who my audience is. If I ever did. So what can I say, but – whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever your reasons for reading this – thanks for reading?! As long as someone is reading it, I’ll keep writing it.
See you again soon.
My brother and me posing for a photo in Banff in the early 1960's.
Diarists end up over the years creating their own personal book of days. I’m always aware of this on my birthday, for example. It’s not so much the fact that I think of the day as any great occurrence (he said, modestly), but because I keep a daily journal I could tell you with some certainty where I was and how I was doing on September 24 for the last 30 years or so.
Other days have their own resonance, and one of the most significant days in my life, March 2, just went by. As always, I found myself reflecting on the events of that day back in 1968 as I have in journals around the country for decades, now.
This is what I wrote in my little blue Clairfountaine journal in Caffe Beano on Friday:
In my life, in the mythology of my family (of which there are few of us left for whom any of this really matters anymore, anyway) today is the anniversary of my brother Gary’s death. It was in 1968. He was 16. I was 11. It was an event that would alter my life and shape my personality more than any other in the 55 years or so I’ve been dragging my bones across the face of the earth. Nothing else, good or bad, even comes close.
For 30 years now or so on this day I have dutifully written about my brother, the tragedy of his death, the devastating effect it had on my parents and family, the way it skewed my entry into adolescence, the immediate repercussions and the ongoing lingering colourations of who I am and how I am.
It’s hard to believe that I am now the parent of a child who at 19 is now 3 years older than my brother ever got to be. My rudimentary math tells me he would have been 60 now. When I think of him, which truthfully isn’t all that often anymore, I think of that 16 year old boy and how he was the day he died. I remember him listening repeatedly to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the old stereo in our dining room and smoking a million cigarettes with his friends. I always think of him as being older than me. Not as an older man, but as a boy. Despite my advanced age, I still think of that boy as being my elder, superior in every way to me.
That being the case, it would seem that I still must maintain within me something of that 11 year old boy who woke up one morning in the late winter, eager to play a game of basketball with his team, only to have his world rocked. When I woke up, my mother called me and asked me to come into her room. She was still in bed. She had been crying. I was about to have the rug yanked out from under me in a dramatic and decisive way . . .
As I say, that’s just one of probably 30 such entries I have made on that particular day of the year, March 2. Last year’s was much grimmer, and written in poetry. Here’s just a fragment:
funeral, etc/the sudden too much attention/ paid to a shy 11 year old boy/I didn’t want it didn’t welcome it/family crumbling/ undirected/unfocused/undisciplined/music refuge/literature refuge/this journal/some drugs some sex/I liked having sex I think . . .
You get the idea. It’s too hard emotionally to think of going through my big suitcase of journals and find more examples. But I think the point is made.
And so this day serves as a constant in my life and in my journals. It demands a summing up of where I am now, how I’m doing, how I’ve dealt with an event that happened so long ago. Still dealing with it at some level, I suppose. Even more than my birthday, it is a day for me to take stock and once again, and yet again, to try to define myself as a man.
Dylan Thomas said, “After the first death, there is no other,” and I have to agree with him. (“A Refusal to Mourn” is the name of the poem, it’s a good one.) I think my dad died sometime in March but I am not aware of the date. My mom died sometime in the late fall, but I’m not even sure of the month, I think it was October. Much as I loved them, I’m hardly sentimental about such anniversaries.
Ah, but that one death, on that one day, will continue to haunt me forever.
Thanks for reading . . .
eugene stickland 