the cassandra pages

Fleurs

Pick one up. Go on. There are no spines on these, but you'd better spread your fingers wide; each one is bigger than your hand and weighs a pound or more.

When I saw this mound of artichokes at Sami's the other day, it was like stumbling on a field of exotic flowers, each one more lovely than the next. Most artichokes, of course, are green - like the specimens to the far right of this photo. But these all had that dark purple blush, and they were enormous and perfect, so of course I had to take a few home.

In the checkout line, a Quebecois man came up to me and asked, "Madame, what are those and how do you cook them?" I thought all French people ate artichokes! But of course I didn't say that, but explained how to prepare and steam them (for a long time, until the leaves separate easily from the stem and the flesh at the base can be scraped off easily with your teeth) and how to make a simple sauce for them (no hollandaise for us anymore; I usually use lowfat yogurt with extra lemon juice and maybe a little extra olive oil, or else just olive oil and lemon juice whisked together.) 

Our artichokes did take a long time to cook in their steam bath. We ate them cold the next day...and the one after that, because each artichoke was too big to finish in one sitting. They were delicious, but much more beautiful in their raw abundance than on our plates.

Sure, Why Not?

With the "Words of Power" issue of qarrtsiluni, Dave started a daily podcast of the authors reading their works (available at the site and at ITunes), with a brief intro and bio of the writer. When there's an image post, though, he and I will be doing audio commentary, sometimes alone, sometimes together. Our first joint podcast went up over the weekend, and it's a freeform conversation about a photograph of a sign outside a Texas compound of some sort, taken by Christopher Woods. Dave is funnier than I am but we had quite a free-wheeling and amusing talk (it's just a few minutes long) - have a listen (click on the "play" arrow just above the photo.)

Booklist

Several people have asked in the comments if I keep a book list, or where it is. The answer is yes, and it's here -- always available as a "PAGE" in the lefthand sidebar, under the heading "Pages," which is the second sidebar category, just below "Recent Posts."

This morning I've just added the first book in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, "Fifth Business." How is it possible that I haven't read these book before? It sounds like they're old friends for many of you...when and how did you discover them?

The other book on the night table is Conrad's second novel, "An Outcast of the Islands." Next up, along with Conrad's "Nostramo," is likely to be Fuentes' "Terra Nova." (Thank you,  Suzanne!)

The Health Care Debate Seen from the North

(at left: sign for a local CLSC: "centre local de services communautaires" or local community service center where neighborhood health and social services are located.)

Since they hear so much about the horrors of the Canadian single-payer system, Americans might be interested to see what the health care debate looks like to Canadians. This recent piece in the Toronto Star by Linda McQuaig gives the flavor of what I've been hearing ever since moving up here - a kind of astonished incredulity, and even pity, that such a rich country can't manage to provide a minimal level of care of all of its citizens. It also expresses the fear of what might happen here, in Canada, if the system is allowed to fragment or fail. Here's an excerpt: 

"...While the U.S. media gave prime time to gun-toting health reform opponents, they all but ignored a Harvard study, reported last week in the American Journal of Public Health, that found nearly 45,000 people die in the U.S. each year largely because they lack health insurance.

As resistance to U.S. health reform rages on - with its inane, vicious, even racist overtones - the fiasco should remind Canadians of the dangers of allowing our public health-care system to deteriorate.

What makes health reform so elusive in the U.S. is the way its opponents - led by wealthy corporate interests - are able to play Americans off against each other.

Americans are hunkered down in their own little bunkers, watching out just for themselves and their families. Anyone proposing reforms that might result in higher taxes is met with a rifle poked out the top of the bunker.

It's this dynamic - citizens pitted against each other - that has kept Americans at each other's throats over health care for years.

It's easy to understand, for instance, why middle class American taxpayers resent paying for medicaid, a public program that provides some coverage for the poor, when these same taxpayers can't afford coverage for themselves and their families.

The only real solution is public health care for all. A Canadian-style plan could save Americans $400 billion a year, Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.

But Americans are so uninformed about the rest of the world that few even seem aware any Canadian can spend weeks in hospital getting state-of-the-art medical treatment and then walk out the front door without owing a penny. Such is the menace of public health care...

...the snarling fury of America's current crop of right-wing extremists almost makes one nostalgic for last year's gentler, childlike lunacy of Sarah Palin."

While the Canadian writer of this article has it approximately correct, I object to her characterization of Americans as "watching out just for themselves and their families", ready to "point a rifle" at anyone proposing higher taxes. There's an element of truth there for sure, but it's an oversimplification. Many are certainly hunkered down, buffeted by competing forces that are certainly a product of capitalism. The bunker mentality doesn't develop from lack of care for others as much as from fear - but to the rest of the world, it looks like meanness, competition, and selfishness coming from the grassroots. Let's talk about the greed of surgeons who make insane salaries, or their counterparts in the top levels of hospital administration, or drug companies, or insurance companies who stand to lose a lot with a single-payer system -- that's greed and meanness. When you go out into the hinterlands and talk to ordinary poor and middle-class people trying to pay for rising health care costs in a terrible economy, you quickly understand that what they feel like are victims of a huge system over which they have absolutely no control -- and that health care is only one of the aspects of American life that makes them feel that way. People in dire straits, without a great deal of education, and full of anxiety, are easily manipulated by fear tactics.

I wish Americans could understand that universal coverage actually works, and I wish that the Scandinavians, French, and Canadians could really understand the pressure that so many un-insured or under-insured Americans are under. When I talk to people here they really don't get it; that level of suffering in the midst of perceived plenty is as incredible to Canadians as compassionate and fair universal coverage is to many Americans. We all succumb to sterotyping, and while I won't defend America's insularity, greediness, or me-first-ness, those are not the overriding characteristics of the Americans most at risk in this debate.

How We Read

How do we choose what to read? When in our lives do we develop our own particular habits of browsing, then choosing a book -- and the book that comes after it -- habits that I suspect stick with us because they have quite a lot to do with our personalities?

I wonder if those of us who grew up in libraries have markedly different reading habits than the online generation. That search through the shelves for something new, with nothing in particular in mind when we start, isn't something that can be replicated in a bookstore-less, library-less existence - or can it? And then there's the pleasure of confronting a whole shelf of a particular author's work and knowing that you can read from one end to the other, burrowing through the pages like a real bookworm, until that sad day when you emerge out the other end into empty air, suddenly hungry again.

When I was little, there were plenty of bookshelves in the house, especially the tall one in the darkness near the stairs where most of the literature lived. But we also made weekly trips to the town library, an historic building in a park, full of shelves much taller than me, dark wood paneling, and framed oil paintings on the walls above the books and in the reading room with its fireplace and overstuffed chairs; Mary Elizabeth, the spinster librarian presiding over this vast storehouse of books from her desk in the middle of the library, frowned on children going into that room at all. Later on, of course, I discovered that this was a small library, as libraries go, but in a rurul area without a single good bookstore, it held the treasures of my young life and started me on my trips to the faraway and exotic, the frightening and alluring past, and to parts of my own country that felt as distant and strange as mythical kingdoms and dripping jungles. I loved nothing more than long family sagas that went on for book after book or, at least, for eight or nine-hundred pages, and it was there, I think, that I first developed the habit of reading every book I could find by favorite authors.

School got in the way, of course, with required reading lists of books by people who seemed arbitrarily chosen for cultural reasons, skipping through British and American history without apparent connection except that they were all written by white men. I found that I liked southern literature, for its moody sultriness and the hint of violence lurking beneath the surface, and was happy when I discovered Carson McCullers - a woman, no less - whose work touched on the themes that were beginning to feel important to me and whose stories felt much more real to me than, say, Jane Austen's -- and I went on to read a lot of American literature from the south, books I'm thinking of revisiting now, forty years later.

Our town library and home mostly held books written originally in English, but in the truly huge Cornell libraries and Ithaca's good bookstores I began to collect literature in translation, reading widely in my own areas of interest but also influenced by the passions of other students who became my close friends. Apart from the constant Greek language courses I was taking, I didn't have time to take comp lit courses myself, but that must have been when I began compiling reading lists and starting to read more carefully on my own in particular areas, rather than scatter-shot. And as time has gone on, and felt so much shorter and more precious, I guess I've done that more and more, knowing I can never read everything. The Dartmouth libraries, near where we lived in Vermont, were a wonderful resource with open stacks so one book literally led to another: there was a year of almost nothing but Russian literature; a period of recent Latin American literature; a year of Flaubert and Proust and Zola and nearly everything by Thomas Mann; many volumes of Polish poetry; ongoing reading about India and China; many books from and about the Middle East, Turkey, and Persia; a period when I read a lot of modern existentialism; last year's focus on Greek tragedies and foundational works like Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

And then I look up, sometimes, and realize how little I read of the new books being written right now in English, except for what I read online and new books by favorite authors - Pamuk, Ondaatje, John Berger, for instance. Some of you, I'm sure, read new books almost exclusively, and I'd love to hear what you read and why, and how you decide what to read next.

Welcome, folks who've come over via Stumble Upon. There are many other essays and reviews here in the categories of books,  reading, and writing. Thanks for visiting!

Reading Conrad

This fall and winter, I'm embarking on a new reading project: Joseph Conrad's novels (that's what reading all the Greek tragedies will do to you - well, I've got a few more to go. But still.) Somehow, in the slipstream of my literary education, I managed not to read any Conrad, not even Heart of Darkness, but I read that book a couple of months ago, while we were moving, and then picked up one of his late compositions, The Arrow of Gold, which is a wonderful love story as well as an adventure. After that I was hooked. I read Almayer's Folly, his debut novel, and have just finished The Ni----- of the Narcissus (sorry, I can't bring myself to type that word) -- a terrific seafaring book filled with keenly-observed, sharply-drawn characters. I've never gotten into nautical books - never read a single Patrick O'Brien - and yet I soaked up every detail about the Narcissus and its passage from Bombay to London, feeling as aimless and bereft when it finally came into dock as its ragged crew.

Next up is Conrad's second novel, An Outcast of the Islands. I may leave Lord Jim aside for a while, knowing it's one of his masterpieces, and read more of the obscure ones first, but there's something to be said about reading an author's oeuvre from start to finish, following their development and coming as close as one can come to getting inside their head.

I'm not ready to write in detail about Conrad yet, but obviously I'm pretty taken with him - perhaps because he's an unusual choice for me: male, and often condescendingly so; often racist; an adventurist rather than a romantic who writes mostly about men and their games; and (I get the keen sense) at heart a loner. What I've discovered, though, is one of the most remarkable descriptive writers I've ever read. I always thought, I suppose, that he was known for his story-telling, and what his stories revealed about colonial attitudes in "exotic" places -- and of course the best of his novels have spawned endless academic analyses as allegories, filled with symbolism and deep meaning. But he is a very very fine writer, a writer's writer.

Right now I'm curious to hear from some of you who've probably read more of his books than I have -- what did you like, or not, about him? Was Conrad presented to you in school as part of that infamous literary canon? How were his books taught? What do you remember? Have any of you come back to him in later life and discovered new aspects of the writer or his books?

Missa ex machina

Our choir year started up with a roar - of jet engines, explosions, city crowds. Sunday morning we sang Robin Davies' "Missa ex machina," a composition he wrote for the cathedral choirs and prepared electronic tape. In the afternoon we performed his Magnificat and Nunc, and in the evening held the first of two recording sessions to put this remarkable music down in digital form.

I'm a bit worn out today, as I'm sure my fellow singers are too - not vocally as much as in my shoulders and neck and legs: lots of hours of standing and concentrating. It was exhilarating to work on this music and then perfect it during the recording sessions, but what I found most remarkable were the comments from parishioners after the morning service. All of the parts of the mass are scored for voices alongside the sounds of urban and modern life, whether those are street sounds, bird calls against traffic, or the sounds of technology, conflict, and stress, skillfully blended with the words of the different parts of the mass. It's impossible to describe this music, and to put it the way I just have is an oversimplification - the music is subtle. In another month, when the CD comes out, you'll be able to hear it... the listeners on Sunday said things like, "I wish we could hear this more often - maybe it could become our cathedral 'signature' mass!" People who never comment on the music at all said how much they appreciated it.

I think what they were responding to was the fact that the music expresses very well how spiritual life often feels to us today, in the midst of a world in great conflict, pulsing with technology and complexity, especially for people trying to maintain a sense of the spiritual in modern, increasingly secular cities. The door to our cathedral, in the absolute center of Montreal's downtown, opens on St. Catherine Street with its traffic, homeless people, constant noise, sex shops and computer stores. Our recording sessions of this piece filled with traffic noises were, ironically, interrupted many times by local traffic sounds and sirens - at one point one of our tenors went outside to ask an idling tourist bus to please turn off its engine or move elsewhere... Literally beneath us lies the underground city, an interconnected subterranean mirror-city filled with restaurants, stores, salons, and kiosks threaded by the subway. When we sing Evensong from the chancel, we look down the central aisle and see McDonald's. The quiet cathedral undercroft, where the choir practices, opens onto an escalator heading down into that vast underground mall. Stepping back and forth between our world of Palestrina and Sanford, and brightly-lit consumerism, concrete and steel, is something we all do without the benefit of transition or interpretation.

So how welcome it is that contemporary composers are taking risks like this, creating post-modern liturgical music that attempts to express something real about the internal and external worlds of our daily habitation. At the conclusion of Davies' mass, the Agnus Dei, that great plea for forgiveness that precedes communion, ("Oh Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us...have mercy upon us... grant us thy peace") ends with vague sounds of distant war, and the music never resolves into a platitude, or even, for that matter, anything resembling an answer.

Spinning

It's been a really busy week, both work-wise and in the evenings, between a big job with a pressing deadline, the conclusion of the qarrtsiluni chapbook contest and preparation of the printed copies of the winning manuscript, final editing for the upcoming qarrtsiluni regular issue, "Words of Power," and the start of our fall choir season. Last night we also went to a vernissage (art show opening) and silent auction, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the cathedral building, in which J. had a photograph on display, and then went to Chinatown for a late dinner at a little upstairs Szechwan restaurant - a hot and delicious end to a long day.

I'm still trying to get used to the totally new routine of "going to work" - it's bizarre. One part I particularly enjoy is the early-morning ride through the neighborhood streets, watching the shopkeepers rolling out their awnings and sweeping the sidewalks, people watering the flowers on the second-and third-floor balconies, the cats being so cat-like in the alleys and on the porches. Then, in the evening, cycling home and seeing the other commuters on bikes and on foot, coming from the metro, or joining me in a stop at one of the markets to buy provisions for dinner. For as hard as I've always worked, I never felt part of this sea of commuting workers because, of course, we worked at home, but also because we tried - in Vermont, where all errands were done by car - to plan our trips out into the surrounding world at low-traffic times.

The weather has been beautiful here for the past two weeks - dry, bright, and warm - and I think everyone is just hanging onto these days, knowing what's inevitably ahead. On the warmest afternoons and evenings, the park has been full of people picnicking, drinking wine, playing music, watching their kids and dogs run around in the sunlight -- but less and less so after nightfall. Last night when we came home, at 10:30 pm, a few groups of friends lingered near the still water, wrapped in shawls and sweaters against the cool night air, as if their witness could somehow prolong the loveliness of these days, a still point against the swiftly spinning earth.

Movie-d Out

The Montreal Film Festival concluded yesterday. At this time we were waiting for the start of our second film in a row, an Iranian production called "Penalty", about a group of people who had become homeless after the Iran-Iraq war and were squatting on the grounds of an old oil refinery; their only joy comes from playing soccer -- and their only hope of finding homes or a better life is to be chosen for the Oil Company team. It sounds a bit like "Rocky" in Farsi, but wasn't at all - it was much more a portrait of the wreckage left by that terrible war, which not only resulted in tremendous casualties on both sides, but rendered many people homeless and left many former soldiers irreparably damaged by chemical weapons.

The earlier film was "Solo quiero caminar", translated as "Just Walking," a Spanish thriller about international drug trafficking, with a twist: the evil but handsome head of the drug cartel is being set up by a gang of four professional thieves, all of whom are women. It was too violent, and I especially hate seeing women getting hurt, but I have to admit that I really liked the movie, and it kept me riveted to my seat. By the end, I was half in love with Diego Luna, as well as the leading actress, Ariadna Gil, and I really, really wanted her red tango dress.

We would have put the second-place film, "Weaving Girl," from China, ahead of the festival's overall winner, the film about the Roma I mentioned earlier. But our personal favorite, not chosen for the main competition, was a Mexican movie, "Caja Negra," by a young director (Ariel Gordon) who was present at the screening. It too was a suspense movie, about a hired assassin and political/corporate intrigue, but made on a small budget -- in his pre-screening remarks, the director said all the animation had been done in his own living room by a team of five people - and almost all the footage was shot using little surveillance cameras, and pieced together to seem as if the whole movie was captured on security videos. The screenplay was terrific, inventive, unusual -- what a pleasure to see something so different, so risky, and so good, and be able to tell the director in person! (This is a 2009 new release, not the 2002 film by Luis Ortega.)

And now we're glad to be able to enjoy the great early fall weather like normal people, instead of blinking mice emerging from their dark holes into the sunlight. Is that why film stars always wear dark glasses?

Milkweed 1

Here's what it looked like in Zone 4 on September 1. We'll follow this clump through the fall and see what we can find...doesn't look like anything's chomping on those leaves yet. (Seems like I remember Dave chronicling the drama at a stand of milkweed a while back - yep - and many more times than once, now that I've gone back to look. Try this one: "Love and Death at the Milkweed Saloon.")

-----

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon at our studio. This week, with the students' return (la rentree, as the French call "back to school") choir begins again. Thursday nights will become what they've been for most of my life - rehearsal nights, and it will be the rare Sunday afternoon I spend like this rather than back at the cathedral for Evensong. Much as I look forward to singing regularly again, I have a little bit of that wistful end-of summer, end-of-freedom feeling - though this summer has felt anything but carefree.

I know myself well enough now, though, to know I'm happier when I wake up and have at least a general idea of what I'm goign to be doing that day - a plan, if not a strict routine. We seem to be settling into a pattern of sorts, where J. leaves for the studio an hour or two before I do, giving me some time alone to write, meditate, work at home before coming here by bike or car. We prepare our lunch here - a microwave, toaster oven, small fridge, and electric kettle seem to be perfectly sufficient - and then continue working until five or six, when we head back home for dinner. It's very odd for two people who've worked in their home for thirty years to suddenly do what 90% of the rest of the world's workers do - go somewhere else to work - but so far, we like it. Sometimes one or both of us come back in the evening, but we find we like having home feel like a haven, completely different from our workplace. I arrive at the studio the next morning feeling refreshed and happy to be here, and later I'm ready go home to cook, read, listen to some music, sit outside for a bit; sometimes we stop at the boulangerie or epicier on the way home.

Lately I haven't even been taking my computer back to the apartment. That's pretty radical, for me anyway. I did get my old laptop out of the closet and boot it up a few times, but there's something about this new pattern that feels healthier, and certainly worth a try. Last week I finished Guy de Maupassant's "Une Vie" in French, and started one of his collections of short stories; like the music, getting back to reading is such a simple joy.