I have just finished reading Neil MacGregor’s excellent book, A History of the World in 100 Objects. MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, where all of his 100 objects can be found. The book is beautifully illustrated with photos of each of the objects and then some. It is based on a series originally done on BBC Radio 4.
If you have any interest at all in the history of mankind from 2,000,000 years ago (Olduvai stone chopping tool) to the present (solar-powered lamp and charger), this is a good book for you to lay your hands on. There’s a paperback version, but it doesn’t seem to have all of the illustrations in it so I recommend getting the hard cover version, which is published by Penguin (2010, $42.00).
For those interested generally in the subject of anthropology, this book is very, shall we say, digestible. It is written in bite-sized bits, I suppose to fit the original radio format. It offers a small but lucid glimpse into different times and places. One feels a whole lot smarter after reading this book, if I do say so myself.
The idea of using objects to talk about history, I find, is very effective. It seems to objectify a time and place in a very efficient manner, reminding the reader always that we are all part of the great human family that stretches back in time over 2,00,000 years.
I’ve been thinking about objects, the things we have, for a the past few weeks as I’ve watched the people in Calgary who were hit by the flood having to divest themselves of most of their possessions. I have heard it said before that we consumers are only intermediaries between the store and the landfill, and that we even pay for the privilege of being so. Never has this seemed so apparent as now.
A lot of people choose to surround themselves of a lot of things, a lot of objects. Looking at it when it’s all piled up, wet and soggy and smelly and misshapen, covered in river silt, house after house, street after street, it really does beg the question, “How much stuff do we really need?”
Be that as it may, I’m not criticizing anyone who has just survived a flood. It’s realy a very horrible experience and my heart goes out to all my neighbours who have had to endure this catastrophe. And yet, it’s probably safe to say that many of us in North America tend to have a lot of stuff, to the point where one could legitimately ask, “Do we possess our possessions or do our possessions posses us?”
I almost wonder if there’s a sense of liberation that comes from losing a lot of it, and whether people who have weathered this storm will choose to live in a more austere fashion in the future. Hell, maybe they’ll go back at it with renewed vigour and zeal, I guess we’ll find out. Time will tell.
On any account, between the book and the flood, I looked around my own apartment and asked myself what is really important here, and what isn’t. There’s an old after-dinner question that goes, “If your house was on fire and you could only take one thing with you, what would it be?” It is very telling about a person’s true nature as to how he or she answers that question.
And so, I wondered if it would be a useful exercise for me to look for not one but 10 (but not 100!) objects in my apartment that I could use to tell my own personal history, in the same manner in which MacGregor tells the history of the world with his 100 objects. So to that end I’ve been looking around my apartment the last couple of days, for the first time in my life taking a long, cold look at the things I surround myself with, asking myself what they have to do with me and my story, if anything at all.
The list I have come up with is quite surprising, even to me. So, what exactly is this list, you might ask? Well, dear reader, you have to wait for it. Because it’s my blog and I can do what I want to, tomorrow I will begin a series of ten pieces on ten objects in my apartment that I feel tell the story of my life. I plan on doing this in ten days. We’ll see if I manage to pull that off or not, given that I have no one other than myself to give me a hard time about deadlines.
I think this is an interesting project — I hope to others besides myself — and I hope you will check in and see what things I have on my list and what I have to say about them.
In the meanwhile, I encourage you to look around your place, at your stuff, and figure out for yourself how your own stuff reflects or even defines who you are.
Thanks for reading. Happy Canada Day! See you back here tomorrow.
Here’s Oscar Peterson with my favourite Canadian song of all time, eh . . .
The Bow River under Crowchild Trail just west of downtown.
I am writing this post partly for the sake of my readers who don’t live in Calgary, but I hope it will be of interest to those who live here as well . . .
As you may know, I live in Calgary which is a largish city (for Canada at least) located at the western end of the Canadian prairies, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is the centre of the oil and gas industry in Canada and so it’s one of Canada’s wealthiest cities.
The residual wealth that trickles down from oil and gas has actually helped to create a thriving arts and culture scene here, which I like to refer to as the art patch as opposed to the oil patch. As you can probably guess, I identify more with the latter than the former of these patches.
Generally speaking, the people in the two patches don’t always get along so well. They (oil) seem to think that we (art) don’t work and we (art) often think that they (oil) operate without any evidence of a soul.
This dirty roiling mess is usually quite placid beautiful blue-green water from the mountains, some of the nest trout fishing anywhere.
But, we do share the same geographical area, one of the features of which is the proximity to the mountains. Banff, for example, is just over an hour’s drive west of here.
Two rivers (in particular) originate in the mountains and flow down through Calgary, the Elbow and the Bow. The Elbow flows into the Glenmore Reservoir in the south part of town and it is from here we get our drinking water. It then flows north and east from the reservoir up through some of the finest neighbourhoods in the country and meets up with the larger Bow River just east of downtown, which is the site of Fort Calgary.
A few days ago a number of forces came together to cause these two rivers to flood in a way no one here can ever remember happening before, not like this. Those forces included the melting snow pack in the mountains along with a record rainfall in the mountains, the foothills and in Calgary. All that water has to go somewhere and it all went into the two rivers which soon flooded their respective banks, leaving large areas of the city underwater, causing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Although I live nowhere near either river, people in the block east of me were evacuated yesterday (Friday) not so much because of the water but because there were problems with the power grid and so the power was lost for a number of apartment buildings downtown, hence the evacuations.
It’s like it’s boiling.
Obviously, the situation wasn’t as dire here as for people living along the rivers. Some of them lost everything, and all of them have a horrible mess to return home to.
All of which brings me to my point about the amazing spirit of generosity that flowed through our city as a result of this situation.
I first became aware of it on Thursday evening when the shit really hit the fan and we all began to realize how serious the situation was becoming.
I was following events as they unfolded on Facebook. The updates on there turned out to be more comprehensive and current than anything I could find on television. I watched in disbelief as news spread of neighbourhood after neighbourhood being evacuated. Some of them were only a few blocks from my apartment, and all of them were places where friends of mine live.
What followed was truly extraordinary. Friends on Facebook, those on higher and drier ground, began offering a place to stay for those who were facing evacuation. I wish I had counted how many offers I saw on Thursday night and Friday, honestly it was in the hundreds.
Then the city workers arrived and bade me to desist.
Not only that . . . people were offering to drive and pick up the evacuees. And not only that! Many were sweetening the pot with offers of food, wine, beer, you name it! People with yards were even billing themselves as “animal friendly” for those with pets.
This generosity was so spontaneous and overwhelming that in a few cases I seriously contemplated pretending I’d been evacuated just to have a little free vacation at someone else’s house. Of course, getting busted on something like that is something you would never live down so I rode the storm out on my own. I even offered a room at my place for anyone who needed it.
After all, I had beer and vodka, coffee and smokes, and a little water. I knew I’d be OK.
And in the end, you know, it didn’t matter much which of the patches you came from or which side of the river you lived on, the people of this fine city came together in a truly inspirational expression of community that for some of us – certainly for me – reminded us why we live here in the first place.
Reminding us, ultimately, that’s there no place else in the world where we would rather live.
The rains have subsided but the rivers are still high. These photos of the Bow River were taken today (Saturday).
There’s a hell of a mess left to clean up, but we’ll get through it, and maybe even be a little richer of a community for it.
In closing, a little number from one of my favourite Calgary-based musicians, Tim Williams, who had a health scare during the flood and had everyone worried but it looks like he’s going to be fine. This is Harrison Lake in BC you’re seeing in this vid, the flooding’s not that bad here . . . not yet . . .
This photograph came to the Eugenius archives today thanks to the little boy you see on the right, my oldest friend in the world, Roy Lyster. Since that photograph was taken in the early 1960’s, Roy and I have gone our separate ways, but in the true manner of old friends, we check up and check in every now and then. Roy was in Calgary last week and we had a lovely evening together.
And now, looking at this photograph that Roy sent out of the blue today, I am in awe that I have been blessed to have such a truly wonderful friend in my life all these years.
I mean, look at us! Could we be more happy!? Is there any place we would rather be than in each other’s company?! I think not.
A few comments on the photo, some 50 years after it was taken . . .
I believe the photo was taken near Roy’s house on the 16 block of Athol Street in Regina. This area has since become, according to Macleans Magazine, the worst neighbourhood in Canada, but it seems pretty damned leafy and safe in this photo. And it was. It was a good place to grow up.
I’m not sure what Roy is doing wearing those high-waisted jeans, but he was always a little ahead of the rest of us fashion-wise. I can’t help but notice that I am wearing a cardigan, which I still do, and am wearing what appears to be Chuck Taylors, which I still wear, and I’m obviously riding a bike, which I still do. Have I not come anywhere in over 50 years on this planet? Have I not evolved? It would seem not.
But as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Further to my wardrobe, you notice I am not wearing jeans, like Roy is. My mom was wont to dress me up a little bit. Legend has it that she insisted my hair be kept long and she liked to dress me in little outfits, pinafores and such. One day my dad was out with me and someone asked him how old his little girl was and that was that. Dad took me to a barber and cut off all my curls. Mom took to her bed and cried for days. I still have an envelope with those curls in it. So I notice I have on dress pants in this photo, which doesn’t really surprise me.
Notice too that I am on a girl’s bike, and with a basket, yet. And notice how gigantic Roy’s bike is in comparison. Roy’s bike even has one of those old school generator and light gizmos. Talk about high tech! I can’t believe he could ride that thing without damaging himself! But why would I have a girlie bike with a basket like that?
The simple answer to that is that I at least had a bike, and, I’m sure, was glad to have it. My parents were hardly wealthy. Neither were Roy’s. But they provided us with what we needed, and we were obviously happy little boys.
Today, the little boy on the right in an immensely talented and successful man, you can read up on him here: http://people.mcgill.ca/roy.lyster/. And elsewhere. And you know about the other boy in the photo. Whatever was going on in our young minds that day almost half a century ago when we set out for a bike ride together, it must have all been good, and our little minds were free and clear to dream big dreams.
One night, a few years after this photo was taken, when we were thirteen or so, we were at a party and Roy had the Old Friends album by Simon and Garfunkel. I remember we wondered that night so long ago if we would be friends like Simon and Garfunkel so beautifully sang about. Well, we’re not 70 – yet – and we’re not sitting on a park bench – yet – but it seems we are destined to be friends to the end. I hope so.
I found the song and share it with you here.
So, here’s to old friends, my friends. Remember the old saying:
Well, well, well. Would you look at that! Just when you thought our streets were safe, who should come skulking around here again but Mr. Grumpypants with another first world atrocity to share with us all. Take it away, Your Grumpiness . . .
Thank you, Eugenius.
Meine Dame und Herren. Mesdames et Messieurs. Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to read my guest column on the Eugenius blog here. Though I don’t mind telling you that I am still awaiting payment from the first post I wrote which was months ago. Does the administration of this blog think I live on air or something? What the hell’s wrong with people, Krisake . . .
On any account, there I was in Safeway. Minding my own business as usual. I was in the eggs and dairy aisle, lovingly fondling the various tubs of yoghurt. A woman of indeterminate age and, I might add, rare beauty, was beside me, so to speak, likewise engaged.
I was caressing a big firm tub of OLYMPIC CREAMA while she was going back and forth from tub to tub of inferior yoghurts, clearly befuddled and unable to make a final decision. She seemed particularly interested in a blue tub of Greek stuff that I had tried myself and found to be wretched. And so what could I do, what choice did I have, I intervened.
“My lady,” I crooned, in dulcet tones, “Do yourself a favour. Forget that stuff, I’ve tried it, it’s no good. Get yourself a tub of the OLYMPIC CREAMA. It’s simply the best. It will change your entire notion of what yoghurt really is.”
“Is it really that good?” she asked?
“It is, it is, it just makes everything else taste like puppy doo doo.”
“Well,” she said, “That’s good enough for me. Thank you.” And she took a tub of CREAMA and put it in her cart. Decisively, if I do say so myself. She gave me a meaningful look, and then shopped on, as did I: she to eggs, and me to cheese.
End of story, you would think. But no. Oh no. Oh no no no. A few minutes later, as I was looking to take my place at one of the checkouts, there she was, hauling a tub of the blue shit I had warned her about onto the conveyor belt. She had obviously slunk back to the yoghurt section when I was out of sight and put back her tub of CREAMA and taken a tub of this inferior blue goo instead.
WTF?!
What can you even say to this type of underhanded skuzzy behaviour? We had a pact, an agreement. We had had a moment. For no personal profit or gain of any kind, other than the satisfaction of helping a fellow human being, I had GONE OUT OF MY WAY to help this thankless hussy and what does she do??? She sneaks back around and makes the old switcheroo.
A low point, a black day, in the history of cooperative shopping, to say the least.
In my mind, I made my way through the lineup behind here and I picked up that blue tub of rancid yoghurt and held it up to her face and screamed: “AH ha! Caught you! You heartless thankless JEZEBEL! You low and vile worse than crawling THING! How could you?!?! How could you do this to US???????”
And then triumphantly made my way to the fruits and vegetables aisle to compose myself. In my mind, at least, that’s what I did.
Ahh, but dear reader, perhaps in another place, at another time, I would have done just that, and then some. But sadly – and herein lies the seat of my grumpiness – I am a Canadian man, bred and trained by my parents to be polite and obsequious at all costs, especially in the presence of women of indeterminate age, and so what did I do?
I averted my eyes, dear reader, pretending I hadn’t noticed this atrocity, and meekly took my place in another line up.
So sad, when I think of what might have been. So sad, so sad.
No wonder they call me Mr. Grumpypants.
I live it my friend Gladys and her Pips to convey the depths of my despair . . .
A number of years ago my friend Michael Finner and I started up a small publishing house in Calgary called B House. It has gone through good times and bad, happy and sad. It’s obviously interesting times in the publishing world. Everything is up in the air. Everything is topsy-turvy. The old rules no longer apply and no one really knows what the new rules are.
In this regard, we are certainly living in interesting times.
While we have been down, we have never really been out. And now, amazingly, we are having an omnibus launch of 5 new books this spring.
Here is the press release I wrote about the launch:
B House Publications is pleased to announce an Omnibus launch of 5 new B House publications featuring the work of some of Calgary’s finest writers. The books will be launched in one evening at Calgary’s Shelf Books, at the corner of 4th Street and 13th Avenue SW on Thursday, June 6 beginning at 7:00 PM.
The evening will be hosted by B House editor in chief, Eugene Stickland. There will be readings by our authors from their books, in the following order.
1. Neil Fleming will read from his play, “Last Christmas.”
2. Eugene Stickland will read from “Cartwheels,” a collections of letters written by Amy Doolittle chronicling her experience with ALS.
3. Virginia Nemitz will read from her volume of poetry, “Swans I have Known.”
4. Jude Dillon will read from his volume of poetry, “The Fractured Garden.”
5. Kirk Miles will read from his volume of poetry, his second with B House, “Hotel on the Cliffs of the Heart.”
There will be an intermission so our friends can look around this beautiful book store and mingle with the authors. There will be a reasonably-priced cash bar and some nibblies. All in all, it will be a rare experience to launch so many books by so many great writers at the same event. Please share this with as many people as you can.
All of these books will also be (or have also been) launched individually by their author, so please check with them to see if there will be other events to celebrate these books.
See you at Shelf Life June 6.
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On the night, I will speak on the ever-changing mandate of B House and offer some insight into what I think is going on in the publishing world. I certainly invite friends in Calgary to take in this event and support our local writers.
There is a link to Shelf Life on the left side of this screen.
According to recent statistics – some of which I read and some of which I am making up, though I think the ones I read can be found in a New Yorker magazine which unfortunately was subjected to water abuse in my bathroom where I tend to read the New Yorker and so had to be thrown out, this having taken place about six months ago, although it may only have been four months ago and could have been as long ago as a year ago, all complicated by the fact that it may not have been a current issue when I was reading it, so you’ll have to take my word for it. “What kind of scholarship is this?” you might well ask. “Shoddy,” you might well reply and you would be right. Further, you might ask, or even demand, what kind of interjection is this that goes on for 150 words, only four words into the sentence? And to that I would say, if you’re even still reading, to paraphrase who was it, Lesley Gore, who had the hit song “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, etc.” in the early ‘60’s (ha ha, I was able to check this one out, it was Lesley Gore and the year was 1963!) that “It’s my blog and I’ll ramble if I want to, ramble if I want to, etc.” Damn, this seemed like such a good idea when I started out. Does that ever happen to you? On any account, I felt terribly guilty about my lack of fact-checking and so spent a laborious three minutes in the Googlean labyrinth and was able to verify that at least in some parts of England what I am talking about here, or what I am about to be talking about, if I would just get on with it, is true – more and more people are choosing to live alone these days.
We might infer from this startling statistic that this means that more and more people are in fact single, but this is where things get a tad murky, because it would seem to me from my experience that, to quote the Gershwins, “It ain’t necessarily so.”
And this is where my research into the I/we shift comes into play. As far as I know, I am the pioneer in this field, the trailblazer, the visionary on the vanguard, as it were, but while I have identified this phenomenon, preliminary research would indicate that it has, in the parlance of the day, traction. (At least it does with my friend Pete, who like me is a single man, and who is so vitally interested in the I/we shift, having encountered it a few times in his own life, so that nothing would do but I write this blog post sharing my findings with a larger public. Speaking of Pete, I might add that he actually has some experience with the we/I shift, but to say more would be to tell tales out of school, as they say, and so discretion would dictate that I say no more, and leave it at that.)
Essentially, the I/we shift occurs when one is talking to someone who is presumed to be single – first person singular, or I – but who soon reveals, linguistically, that he or she is in fact part a couple – first person plural, the dreaded we.
Consider, if you would, the following conversation which is quite a bit like a conversation I had just the other day. I was standing on a street corner winding my watch, when I was approached by a lovely young woman who was either walking her dog or was being walked by her dog, depending on which one of them you talked to.
ME: My, what a lovely hound you have there!
SHE: Thank you.
ME: Is it a short-haired-near-sighted-snorfling-Belgian-water-mutt?
SHE: No, it’s a French bulldog.
ME: Ahhhh, sorry, I tend to get them confused. It’s a handsome dog on any account.
SHE: Thank you. I’m so glad I got her.
ME: I guess you get lots of exercise walking her?
SHE: Oh yes, I walk her three times a day. I’m actually getting into shape!
ME: I can see that. Do you not have a yard, then?
SHE: No, we live in an apartment.
Let me interject here. At this point of the conversation, having encountered the first I/we shift, I was on uncertain footing, as I didn’t know if the we referred to by the young lady meant herself and the dog, or herself, the dog and some hulking, brooding geologist with his head shaved, you know the type. The kind of man of whom one and all might ask, “What the hell is she doing with him??” Oh, the imprecision of the English language. Although I knew we were heading into choppy waters, I none the less sailed on.
ME: Yes, I too live in an apartment, I guess most of us down here, do.
SHE: Well, I’m hoping to get a house some day.
ME: A noble aspiration.
SHE: (dreamily) I love having a yard so can putz about and sunbathe.
ME: (swooningly) A lovely image.
SHE: We’ll have it soon enough. Just as soon as my boyfriend finishes his engineering degree.
There you have it, gentle reader. Not only the completion of the I/we shift, but the added insult of inclusion of the dreaded “B” word. I should have known.
This was a rather slow-developing I/we shift, and of course the longer it is prolonged the more painful it becomes. But I often hear it in one or two sentences, to wit:
I went to Banff yesterday, I love it there. We love hiking, I love my boyfriend.
Not quite so drastic as that, perhaps, but alarmingly close.
It all makes me wonder, are there any single people left out there, or are we always taken somehow, by someone, to some extent?
On any account, there you have it: the I/we shift. Check it out for yourself, tell your friends, remember where you saw it first.
I’ll leave it for my old friend Tom Waits to mop things up.
It’s Mother’s Day and so our thoughts turn to our mothers and all they have done for us. My mother, Stella, was a real beauty, a true child of the prairie, she could run across a field and jump on a horse and ride it bare back, when she was a girl.
It wasn’t always easy to see that bright athletic girl in her when she grew older, when she grew old. Her final days were not easy ones, she was in physical agony on account of osteoarthritis, and then her mind was ravaged by Alzheimer’s Disease. When she died, of course I was sad, but I was relieved as well. It really was a tough go for her at the end.
I’ve been watching the progress of my friend Michael Finner’s mother as she, now, enters into the endgame. It’s not easy for Michael or his brother Frank and sadly it sounds all too familiar to me.
After his visit with his mother today, Michael shared the following on Facebook, and kindly agreed to share it here on my blog. So here’s my best friend and publisher Michael J. Finner talking about visiting his mother on mother’s day:
To Whom It May Concern :
I went up to the extended care unit to see my Mother today. She was quietly sleeping and after I put a bouquet of flowers by her bed I sat down and watched her for a while. Like a dream within a dream, pushing well into her 90’s now, she reminds me of a little bird. And it seems like she grows smaller every day. No doubt, one of these days, she will just up and disappear.
I am very thankful that at this time of her life she is very peaceful as well as comfortable as she is. Oh, yeah, once and awhile she lets go with a verbal blast aimed at no one in particular. But I think that’s just to let you know she’s still very much alive. And although there’s always the pretended outraged expression of ” Oh, …. Mother! ” it is very hard to keep from laughing. In truth, sometimes we laugh together. Howl might be a better description. I think this is probably just her way of getting a rise out us and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity. Her sense of humour, if nothing else, is completely, or at least for the most part, intact.
Yes, there are days when she wonders who I am. Where she is. Who the nurse is. The one she was calling by name only a moment ago. She usually confuses me with my brother Frank. And vice versa. Her cognition and her eyesight are going but not yet completely. Finding out dementia was come on followed by the news she was going blind really took it out of me and I must say I sadly lacked in the stiff upper lip category when I learned the same. My Mother always was, and is, a far, far braver person than I. We usually close each visit with a little kiss. Then she tells me that she loves me and of course, just like some kind of prayer, I tell her the same. Dementia or no. It is as it always was and always will be. Unconditional love.
So here is to Mothers everywhere. The ones I know personally . The ones I don’t know at all. May God’s love (whichever one you believe in) shine down upon You and Yours. Each and every day of your lives. As for my previous mention of the disappearing act that comes to us all – in closing let me leave you with this thought that crossed my mind as I was leaving my Dear Mama today.
This observation was made by Chief Crowfoot of the Blackfeet Nation some time ago. Somehow it always leaves me at peace.
What is life?It is the flash of a firefly in the night.It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Dad and daughter back in the day, looking a tad preppy!
My daughter Hanna, aka to some of you as Johanna, was recently turned down in her application to study photography at one of our universities. Rejection is always hard, I know. I reminded her that I was rejected by UBC but then was accepted at York for my MFA.
So I know it’s not easy, no matter how much you have going for you. It’s a hit to the ego and it hurts.
The people at the university in question, trying to be competitive and fair, looked at Hanna’s high school grades which they felt were a little low.
What they didn’t know was that she had given up a promising and potentially lucrative modeling career which was taking place mostly in New York (and London and Paris) to return to Calgary to finish school in the first place.
That she finished high school at all was a bit of a miracle, and I know that when her mother and I watched her graduate we felt especially proud of the very mature decisions she made as a young teenager to get her to that point.
But now, the chickens have come home to roost, I suppose. She is disappointed, but I gently reminded her that she is currently working in the real world of photography, in some cases with artists whom her (not to be) professors have only read about, and so to keep moving forward and to never stop making her own way in the world.
And I shared with her my little metaphor about how a career in the arts is like riding on a train, and I as I know many artists read this blog, I wanted to share it here with you, with Hanna’s blessing.
I end up with her some of her thoughts on modeling along with some of her photos from a recent issue of INTERRUPT Magazine.
THE TRAIN
The train metaphor is about having a career as an artist. When you are young, you see the train going by and think, that looks cool, I think I’d like to be on that train. So you run after it a bit and catch up to the last car but it is totally packed and instead of people helping you up they seem to be pushing you away. There are even people hanging off the edges but you finally grab onto a piece of the railing or a ladder, you grab on and hang on for dear life and away you go.
Finally you get yourself pulled up into the back of the last car. It’s crowded and smelly and there’s hardly enough food and sometimes not even a clear space on the floor to sleep on and many times you think of jumping off because you see others jumping off, but you hang in there and the good thing about others jumping off is that it clears a little room for yourself and so gradually you are able to move forward in the car and even dream of what’s waiting in those cars ahead of you on the train.
And those others jump off at very nice places like law schools and accounting firms and marriages with lovely suburban houses and puppies and such, it’s all so tempting. Have a good look, because either you have that, or you stay on the train, it seems you can’t have it both ways.
So you stay on. At times the trip is tedious and monotonous and you wonder why you bother as do others, and they keep jumping off at the oddest places and yet there is more and more room, to the point it can get quite lonely at times. But you stay on the train and eventually make your way up to those cars ahead of you, where it gets a little better, a little easier.
After all your work and sacrifice, you might pass by those who jumped off and they will look at you with a mixture of admiration and loathing and think to themselves, “I was on that train once myself, I could still be on there too, but I jumped off . . .”
Well, say hello and wave good bye, you’re either on or off.
And the way is never easy or predictable. You say you should frame your rejection letters . . . Hemingway wallpapered his living room with rejection letters before he ever got published. I have a stack of them, and even at my age and with some reputation, I know that stack is growing.
That’s no reason to quit, though. All the more reason to carry on. It’s not easy, but you might find as the train continues on its course, eventually you will make it up to the front cars where you can actually get a seat and maybe they’ll bring you a drink and you can look out at the passing scenery and know there’s no place else on earth you would rather be.
And that’s my little metaphor of the train that has sustained me all these years and I hope it will you, too.
Here’s Hanna with the final word. Thanks for reading!
Shot on film, unretouched, I call it Waiting for Summer
If you know me at all, you know that I take aspects of old school to a heightened level of funk.
The most consistent and enduring example of this is my love of fountain pens and mechanical pencils and the fact that I write first drafts of almost everything I publish or produce long hand, in graph paper notebooks.
Some think this is a tad eccentric and they may be right but I hardly care. If you’re successful, you’re considered eccentric. If you’re a failure, you’re considered weird. So I’ll take eccentric, thank you very much.
Again, if you know me at all, you know I love to take photographs. Some of my photos have ended up on the covers of books and published elsewhere, hither and yon. Many of them grace the walls of friends, usually gifts from me, but from time to time a wealthy patron will actually pay me for my troubles.
And yet once again, if you know me at all, you know I have a daughter named Hanna, although professionally she is known as Johanna, and you may know that she has done some modeling in her time – nothing major, just the Dior show in Paris, par example – and is making her way in the world and finding her artistic expression on the other side of the camera as a photographer.
But here’s the thing. While I have always shot digital, Hanna who must have picked up her old school predisposition somewhere, I wonder where, prefers to shoot on film. And while I’m an old school gentleman myself, I never understood her desire to do so until a friend gave me a beautiful Minolta Dynex 500si this week and I shot, for the first time in decades, a roll of film.
Suddenly, brave new world, I discovered why Hanna is into film and not into digital.
It hits on so many levels. Putting in the film in the first place. Did it really get in there properly? Am I really taking photographs or is the film just bunched up inside? Will I be wasting my time for the next 24 or 36 shots?
And then – what I think I love the most – the sound and the feel of the click as the shutter opens and closes again. For a photographer, perhaps this is the most satisfying sensation in the world.
Then there is the care that you have to line your shot up with. You only have one chance, you can’t take ten like you do with a digital.
And so you take your shot, but then what? You can’t look at it. You can only hope, maybe pray, that it will turn out. And then you take a bunch of other shots, again hoping and praying, until your roll is done.
And then the film rewinds and you can only hope that the film isn’t all fucked up inside your camera. You open the back and take out the roll and you go to London Drugs or whatever and give it to them so they can develop it and make you some prints.
And then you wait. You’re aware of the exact time that you can go and pick up your prints. It seems to take forever. And when you do pick them up, there is a strange moment of truth when you first see the envelope and see that there are actually prints in there and so far so good, you now have something to look at.
You take your envelope to a special place and open it and look at your prints. What a moment! And then all those shots come back to you. Some suck, most suck. Some are ok. But a few of them, even one of them, might just be inspired.
It’s such a beautiful and prolonged process compared to the instant gratification of seeing what you just shot digitally.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and so I am content to imitate my daughter in this regard, as I think she is the most awesome person on the planet.
She was kind enough to share a recent photo of hers here on my little blog.
As you can see, while I take pictures, she’s actually an artist.
A photo that has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
I was minding my own business this morning exploring lofty intellectual trains of thought and fascinating artistic paths leading my imagination to the most verdant pastures, mitigating against the April snow and sub-zero temperatures of the bovine city, when the little alarm (well-named) on my computer rang, informing me that I had mail and I had better attend to it right away, this being the age of frantic impatience after all.
It was from the thing – I really don’t know what to call it so let’s go with thing – called LinkedIn which I seem to participate in although I have no clear idea of why I do or what it even is.
The thing was asking me to “recommend” an acquaintance of mine whom I have never actually met but who is a theatre director and producer, who was charitable enough to produce a play of mine in a non-bovine city far away from here about a decade ago. To recommend him for what, exactly, is still a mystery, to me, at least.
Well, OK. Fair enough. He directed and produced my play, he is obviously a visionary, a genius, probably, and a decent fellow to put meat on my table once upon a time. (Note to self: send him another play!) So I had no trouble recommending or endorsing him, but of course you can’t just do that, you have to jump through the hoops of the thing and these hoops were not intended to accommodate the recommendation of a playwright for a director.
In fact, responding to the drop-down menuized categories with insane questions like “Did you answer to this person?” or conversely “Did this person answer to you?” made me realize just how far outside of the mainstream we are, my director friend and I, and so what the hell was I doing wasting my time going through this process anyway?
The simple answer to that is that I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by not recommending him. How terrible and bleak would that be if the thing sent him a message saying “Eugene Stickland has declined your recommendation request.” I don’t want to cause him that kind of anguish.
So I muddled through, and now I’m sure when he sees my ringing recommendation, which I managed to convey in spite of the thing’s bland categories, not because of them, he will be filled with a rush of pure joy and contentment and may even ask me for another one of my plays.
“Good old Eugene,” he may well think to himself, “I really ought to do another one of his plays!”
Well, never mind that the categories and questions of the thing make it seem like we were stock boys at Wal-Mart together in our awkward teen years. Or intermediate clerks in an insurance company, glue-sticking riders into policies in a windowless office – which you can probably tell I actually did once in my life, until I developed a case of shingles and was advised by my doctor to get out of the insurance game, to get out of the basement, to put down the glue stick, which I did, and the rest as they say is history . . .
Well, whatever. I’m sure many of my readers, especially those in the arts, can relate to that feeling of outsiderness as you search for some kind of connection from your own life to the categories and experiences that appear in these drop down menus. It’s probably not overstating the case to say that at such times, we realize we don’t really belong anywhere, there is no category for us, there is no experience the thing can drop down on us that even vaguely resembles our own experience on this planet.
Once more, out of step, out of rhythm, marching to the beat of your own damned drum.
But lest we forget, this is a good thing.
When you find they have a category for you, it’s probably time to change it up and move on.
I have just finished reading Neil MacGregor’s excellent book, A History of the World in 100 Objects. MacGregor is the director of the British Museum, where all of his 100 objects can be found. The book is beautifully illustrated with photos of each of the objects and then some. It is based on a series originally done on BBC Radio 4.
eugene stickland 