Well, except that there’s a loud-speaking voice carrying into our ninth-floor apartment from the college next door. No doubt, it’s another exercise in, well, exercise and patriotism and precision marching for the young people of Qing Gong Xue Xiao. (This means something like the School of Light Industry, and as far as I can tell it’s where the future barbers, seamstresses and short-order cooks of Dalian come from.) Like all college and university freshmen — though some of these kids look about 15, and may have simply not qualified to get into high school — their first few weeks of school are spent marching, shouting patriotic slogans, and singing team -building songs.
It’s a perfect day to account for my failings as a writer, quite apart from the practical consideration that I have to teach school today. The call came. It came to me. I’m a class act.
I find myself at one of the real centres of juvenile creativity in Canada, Canterbury High School. It’s a specialized arts school. The annual musical is spectacular, and a far more important event than any number of Big Football Games. (Actually, there is no football at Canterbury. There aren’t even that many boys at CHS; it’s about a 70/30 split. The kids who attend here because they live in the immediate district are also a minority. They’re called “Generals”, as opposed to “Visuals” or “Instrumentals” or “Vocals”, and they can find it a hard place to come in some respects. The place is crammed with keeners who applied from all over the region to come here and dance, sing, play, act, paint, sculpt and write. It may still be the only school in the country with a Literary Arts program. My family’s move to Ottawa five years ago was made, in large measure, because Son the Third had been admitted here as a ninth-grade writer. It was a 500-kilometre move, and an easy decision, finally, and a wonderfully fruitful one.
Replacing Ms. Barkley today, my Dave’s ninth- and twelfth-grade writing guru, I’m in a class where to write myself seems not only possible but necessary. Grade 12s. Supremely pleasant and diligent and highly motivated, which does not suggest that they are not also distracted by the epic conversational possibilities with fellow writers they’ve shared and performed and edited and sweated with for four years now. Still, they don’t need much from me. It’s a strange kind of a high school. It’s beyond okay to be smart, to read, to care about social issues and cultural richness. Among the seniors, it verges on being a requirement, which explains why coming from the school catchment area without actually belonging to the Arts Canterbury crowd can be a bit of a trial. Generals. Of course, it could be a rich and fascinating place to wind up in if, say, you were a smart, sophisticated and confident adolescent, unbounded by cliques and suspicion. In other words, for only a few.
But back to me. (It’s all about me.) I am prone to think, Gosh. Sons One and Two would have been so much more at home or challenged or stimulated by a high school experience like this one. But I am also subject to selfish and exculpatory thoughts: Damn, if I’d been exposed to the idea that writers were real, if I’d had the chance to be among other kids that read as much or more than I did, if I’d been encouraged to write and party ARTY when I was young, I wouldn’t find the literary learning curve so steep in my advancing age. I coulda bin a contendah. I coulda bin a star. Yeah, I just didn’t get the breaks. Sigh. Et cetera.
All of which helps me not at all, but it’s a soothing diversion. And it’s writing, and so am I. And it’s now. And the bell hasn’t even rung yet. Maybe I’ll even get around to posting about the WritersFest, as I recently promised.
I’m not accustomed to being this current in my reading, especially with something other than the occasional sports page, but yesterday I launched into the summer ’06 edition of Brick, a literary journal published in Canada. (While it’s still summer. Imagine.) It is far from alone in deserving (and needing) a wider readership, and in bringing something just a little loftier to minds ready for more than stock quotations and Red Sox scores; that is to say, to most educated adults. The rewards are many.
Here are two of them. First, I read the transcript of a radio interview I’d heard last spring with Leonard Cohen. Five of his songs were being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame; he was humble, charming, intelligent. (I wrote about it here in an earlier entry.) It was a pleasure to stumble upon such a rare treat again.
Second, I was introduced to literature’s Mr. Roth, not the American novelist Philip but the Austrian writer Joseph, a little-known figure that scholar and translator Michael Hofmann has made it his life’s work to know and love and advocate. “My Life with Roth” gives scant detail about its subject – surprisingly few traces remain, though he lived until 1939 – but recounts Hofmann’s rather random discovery of Roth and the ten subsequent translations he has done of his novels and letters. He had already convinced me to scribble down The Radetzky March on my burgeoning list of Books I Will Get To Someday, but Hofmann sealed the deal by concluding his essay with the following selection from Roth’s greatest novel. Like much great writing, it is more true now than when it was written. It pierces our nearly omnipresent conviction that efficiency and sheer pace are the hallmarks of our cultural greatness. He echoes Gandhi’s famous dictum that “there is more to life than increasing its speed”. Roth wrote,
In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.
This was my ouch for the day.
(You’re welcome.)
Serendipity lives. Despite my love for the contents of my own little basement-bound library, I still find myself looking for (and believing in) the Right Book at the Right Time. I’m an accidentalist by literary nature: am I dialled in to the there are no accidents synchronicity of the spiritually wired world? Or grasping at the bookish straws of superstition? Take your pick.
But I have learned that I don’t need to pack much homefront reading material when I travel, because text will find me. Sure, too often it’s just that day’s sports or entertainment in another town’s newspaper, but it’s surprising how often I whimsically come across a text that I’d been looking for, or one that filled a need I didn’t know I had. Today’s example comes from an aimless stroll through my local library. Living in the big city now – and Ottawa is hugely sophisticated compared to all my tiny towns – libraries are a whole new deal for me. They’re better than the one at home. There’s great stuff everywhere. On my way to the periodicals, I was stopped by the fairly plain cover of a book featured on the end of a shelf. Why Read? was its title, and why not? was my magnetized reply.
It’s another book on the importance of reading, of course, and though I figured it would be overly familiar, the Ol’ Readin’ ‘n’ Writin’ Coach couldn’t pass it by. Published in 2004, its author, Mark Edmundson, is an American professor of literature. I was attracted by his choice of title, yes, and then by the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote with which he opens the book: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.” [my emphasis] In the face of a literary establishment that favours detachment, irony and deconstruction (and which he skewers with bitter eloquence), Edmundson takes an unabashedly antique position. “Reading woke me up,” he says, and made him a teacher. His beautifully written opening essay, “Literary Life”, lays out his thesis:
[L]iterature…is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes,…our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. However much society at large despises imaginative writing, however much those supposedly committed to preserve and spread literary art may demean it, the fact remains that in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.
You will see that Professor Edmundson is not one for the microscope, not an advocate for poetic alienation and identity politics.
“Books…are for nothing but to inspire.” Edmundson starts with Emerson, and builds from there a passionate and sweetly worded argument that is addressed firstly to those (his colleagues) who teach literature, and secondly to students who “read over the shoulders of your teachers”. He laments the loss of a truly liberal education in America: “Universities have become sites not for human transformation, but for training and for entertaining….[S]tudents use the humanities…to prepare for lucrative careers…[to] acquire marketable skills…[or as] sources of easy pleasure.” Edmundson, meanwhile, wants them to be MOVED, “to become other than they are”.
He insists on personal transformation as the basis of a true education. “’You must change your way of life,’ says Rilke’s sculpture of Apollo to the beholder. So says every major work of intellect and imagination, but in the university now – as in the culture at large – almost no one hears.” Mark Edmundson is gloomy about the way that his beloved literature has been used, torn asunder, isolated or completely abandoned in contemporary life, but goes on to suggest the ways it might be rehabilitated, and therefore help to rehabilitate us. He has something of the tone of the prophetic voice crying in the wilderness, and this emotional appeal combined with his reasoned and gorgeous prose lends it real credibility.
I was reminded of another citation of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, this in the Canadian literary journal Brick. Included in the publishing data at the front of each issue is this statement of literary philosophy: “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” Professor Edmundson would surely approve my added emphasis, and he echoes this frankly ecstatic tone throughout this excellent book. Why Read? is a profound meditation and a call to ivory tower action. I wonder how many are listening.