On Thursday, April 10 I gave a public lecture-slash-reading at St. Mary’s University College where I am an instructor as well as Writer in Residence.
Readers of this blog might remember I wrote about the role of serendipity in my life in a post called Brahms, Gothic Script, Shakespeare, Serendipity and Other Considerations in January, 2012. Obviously, it’s a subject I’ve given some though to over the years and I’m looking forward to the opportunity of expounding on it further.
While the events of the Brahms, etc. post made up a small part of my talk, I focused more broadly on the role of serendipity in my life as an artist, how I ended up writing plays, how I ended up in Calgary and at St. Mary’s University College.
It’s hardly been a straight line, to put it mildly. It’s really been a long, strange journey, as they say, aided and abetted by luck, chance, circumstance and the many wonderful people I’ve had the privilege of meeting and working with along the way.
Without giving the whole thing away, here’s how I thought my talk was going to begin:
Not so long ago I was at a dinner party being hosted by a friend of mine, Marc, a very intelligent and worldly man, a professor at the U of C, originally from Belgium. (A friend of famous chocolatier Bernard Callebaut, in fact the condo where this meal took place once belonged to BC.) Mark’s wife, Susanne, is also intelligent and worldly – and beautiful, I might add. She comes from Sweden. On the evening in question, we were welcoming a visiting mathematician from Germany named Charly, and so over the course of the evening we would shift from French to German to English. (I become much more fluent in all three languages after a few glasses of wine.)
At one point in the evening I mentioned the term “serendipity,” and was surprised that Marc and Susanne weren’t familiar with the term. (Charly knew it well — in fact, it is even one of his favourite English words.) But Marc and Susanne had never heard the word before, in any language. Dictionaries were procured – Flemish, French, Dutch, Swedish and German, but none made any reference to this term that I am reasonably sure any native English speaker would be quite familiar with.
As you know, the English language is comprised of words that originate from many different sources, including Greek, Latin, German and French – to name but a few. And then of course there are the pure Anglo-Saxon words which tend to describe everyday things such as blood, winter and even dickhead – all of these words appeared in the deep mists of time and we don’t really know where they come from.
In the case of “serendipity,” however, unlike most of the words we use in English, we do know exactly where it came from and we even know its birthday . . .
As it turned out, I had far too much material for the hour or so I had been allotted, so this famous passage never was read. But I did talk about various sequences of events in my life that looking back now are down right improbable, and I think everyone who attended came away with just how tenuous a career in the arts can be.
I typed up my thoughts but it became far too long a document to share on here. Still, if you’re interested in what I had to say, let me know and I can email you a copy of my notes.
As usual, thanks for reading. And Charly, I hope you’re happy now . . .
This song really has nothing to do with anything, I just happen to like it.
In my last post, I talked about how changes in technology, especially having to do with smart phones and various Apps like Instagram, have changed the nature of photography, both how it is done and how photos are shared. But what I really set out to talk about was poetry. This post is an elaboration of something I said, probably was in the middle of saying in the photo on the left, at a poetry gathering the other evening. That being, how is it that with all the new technology available today that poetry not only survives but seems to be thriving with little or no influence brought to bear on it by technology?
As I said in my last post, nowadays it’s easy for people to think of themselves as photographers, maybe even a serious photographers, depending on the number of followers they have on Instagram, say.
And yet while this makes perfect sense at some level, what seems remarkable to me is at the same time, more and more people are writing poetry, yet using none of the new technology in the process. iPads and Airbooks and notebook computers have their place for certain types of communication, but from what I’ve observed, poets still favour a pen and notebook (of the paper variety) and in this regard the process of writing poetry hasn’t really changed all much since Shakespeare was writing his sonnets a little over 400 years ago.
I don’t know of anyone who has an App on their phone or tablet that facilitates the writing of poetry. I don’t even know that there is one. (That said, there are two good programs I have discovered for word processing on my computer, Omni Writer and Write Room, that help create a very intense and lovely writing environment, and yet I can’t say I have ever composed anything using either of these programs.)
For me, as for so many, it’s still a matter of opening the old Moleskine (or Leuchhturm which I’ve been using lately and actually prefer to Moleskine) notebook and taking out a pen or pencil and having at ‘er. Technology only enters into the picture when it comes time to edit, I should think. Although one thing I’ve seen lately is people reading a poem from their smart phone, something I haven’t tried yet, but it looks kind of flashy and modern. I guess I’m terribly old-fashioned in this regard — I like the comfort of the paper, or the book, in my hands when I’m giving a reading.
But as I say, poetry seems to be thriving these days nonetheless. If you look at the above photo, you will see a good cross-section of people, of all ages and sexualities and finances and levels of education who have gathered together for the shared communal experience of communicating something vital to them with a roomful of virtual strangers.
That this is just one of many such reading series in a mid-sized city not universally known for its poetry gives a strong indication that whatever the world may be now, there is perhaps more than ever a need for poetry in it.
When I was writing plays and seeing them performed with some regularity, I used to remark on this same kind of shared communal experience that the theatre offers. In one of my ramblings, probably in the Calgary Herald, I speculated that while religion is not a serious option for many people these days, we still seem to feel the need to congregate and share our stories and our feelings. I believe the theatre does that — and I believe that’s why it is still a viable and essential art form.
Now that I seem to be entering a new phase in my life as a poet, I am seeing the same thing at the readings I attend. The internet, and even things like this blog, that you are probably reading in the privacy (and isolation) of your own home, have conspired to isolate many of us, while at the same time (as on Facebook) ironically making us feel more connected than ever before.
But I think it’s safe to say that as a species, we need shared communal events. In essence, we need community. Not electronic, but actual flesh and blood and bone. As an artist, I believe I am able to contribute to this cause, and the feeling I get in a theatre, or a poetry reading, tells me that it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity. And so I soldier on.
Ian Leslie has an interesting article in this month’s Intelligent Life titled “In Search of Serendipity.” Appropriately enough, I came across it accidentally when I was wandering around another aggregate site, The Browser.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how the Internet is changing the shape and scope of our minds, making us better at skimming information but less likely to engage in deep thought on any one subject. (“Life With No Computer” published here in early December, 2011.)
Leslie’s argument is that with the “democratization” of information, true serendipity (which he simply defines at one point as a happy coincidence) is becoming a rarer phenomenon. This got me thinking about the role of serendipity in my own life and career, and the fact that the early years were pre-internet, in fact pre-computer. (My first play was written on a typewriter!)
Artists are frequently asked about our careers, as if we somehow planned them to work out the way they did. I would suspect that with most of us, and maybe not just artists, maybe it’s true of doctors and lawyers and such, serendipity plays a huge role in our lives. So this is part of my story, and this blog is a rough sketch for a public lecture I will deliver at St. Mary’s University College later this year.
When I was a young man just starting out, I went to the University of Regina as a music major in piano performance. I finally realized with some pain and regret that I wasn’t good enough and so after a while slid over into English, but I had a few delusional years there when I though I might have a chance. During this time I became passionately interested in the work of Johannes Brahms, and in those days before the Internet, I did what we all used to do to find out more about him: I went to the library.
The fine arts library at the University of Regina had a good selection of books on Brahms. The trouble was, they were all written in German, some of them old enough to be in Gothic Script. So what to do? Serendipitous moment #1: I enrolled in a German class. I am of English heritage and I spoke not a word of it, but I survived German 100 and so enrolled in German 101 for the winter semester.
Half way through that class, my instructor, Frau Holle. a lovely woman of Austrian extraction, invited me up to her office for a late afternoon drop of sherry. (Imagine having a student of the opposite sex up to your office for a drink these days!)
“Herr Schtickland,” she said, “We have a very grave problem. I was hoping you could help.”
Each year the university was awarded a very generous scholarship by the Goethe Institut for one of its students to study in Germany for six months. No one from the upper years was free to take it, and they basically needed a warm body to fill the position so the scholarship wouldn’t be lost in future years.Was I free to go?
Serendipitous moment #2. I was, and I did.
This is what I looked like back then. This is what photographs looked like back then:
1977, the year Elvis died. With a mustache sitting on some kind of ancient German beast. A typical mid-70's photo.
So off to Deutschland. Before the course started, I had a few weeks to kill so I went up to England to visit my Aunt Deirdre. While I was there, she suggested I go to Stratford and see some plays. Having grown up in Regina when I did, I hadn’t had the chance to see much theatre, because there wasn’t much theatre to be seen.
Serendipitous moment #3: I went to Stratford and saw a few plays by the old boy. Serendipitous moment #4: A brilliant production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream must have put the idea in my head that writing comedies would be a good thing to try.
And so back to Germany where I learned German well enough that people I met couldn’t tell I wasn’t from Germany. I loved my time there but I began to miss the English language, and so I bought a number of journals and began writing in them, which could well be Serendipitous moment #5. Certainly by the time I returned home, I realized I would never be a great concert pianist and began to think of myself as a writer and not as a musician.
And so I became a writer. I don’t believe I would have ever lived the life I have, if I had not ventured into a library some 35 years ago and become frustrated at not being able to read anything about my favourite composer. Part of the program in Germany was to study Gothic script and I got good enough that I could read a little. When I got back home to Regina, I went back to those books at the fine arts library and hacked through them, but I can’t pretend I gave them a good reading.
Still. what an interesting journey I went on, just to read a few books!
There is a postscript, which happened only a few years ago. There was a man who used to come to Caffe Beano, whose name I cannot remember and who passed away a year or so ago. I didn’t know him very well. He was a collector and seller of antiques, curios and rarities. One summer’s day as I was sitting outside the cafe writing in my journal, this man showed up with a rare find. It was a book published in the early 1500’s, I believe, that he had acquired at a Hutterite colony. It was a real beauty, with wooden covers and a richly decorated cover. Such antiquities are rare on the prairies.
He was showing it around (carefully) to some of the assembled. He opened it up and looked at the title page. “The trouble is,” he said, “I can’t read it. Can anyone here read Gothic script?”
Serendipitous moment #6.
I could, and I did.
Thanks for reading! Stay warm.
PS. I was in Caffe Beano this morning and asked around and found out that the man’s name was Udo. My friend Bob McDonald (aka Bob Loblaw because it sounds like blah blah blah) once bought an accordion from him. Who else are you going to get a good used accordion from? Apparently Udo had garages full of junk, but apparently it was all oxymoronic high quality junk. May he rest in peace. Bob remembers the Gothic Script incident, and told me that his estimation of me increased significantly that day.
On Thursday, April 10 I gave a public lecture-slash-reading at St. Mary’s University College where I am an instructor as well as Writer in Residence.
eugene stickland 