the cassandra pages

Tomorrow will be different.

Is there any emotion more fundamentally human than hope?

On this eve of a new year, I want to think more about the ways we have advanced and grown in our humanity, than our competitive, destructive violence. There has actually been good news this year, and there are ways in which each of us can help our sisters and brothers, as well as the planet. Let's concentrate on those, and on our capacity to keep looking forward in spite of everything.

Happy New Year to you all, and perhaps, demain sera différent.*

*I think the poster, with its incomplete text, is talking about what the world will be like without fossil fuels, but the title is striking nevertheless.

Books of 2015

As 2015 draws to a close, it's time for the annual Cassandra Pages book list. It's shorter than it has been in many years, partly because (I sheepishly admit) after days of working on Phoenicia and design projects and art, we've gotten in a habit of watching an episode or two of TV mini-series in the evenings, and that cuts into my reading time. But the other reason is that several of the books were big reads, and took a long time to finish - and turned out to be highlights of my reading year. So here's the list, with some comments following:

My 2015 Book List (*indicates books read as e-books, ** were audiobooks)

The Japanese Lover, Isabel Allende (in progress)*

Thirteen Ways of Looking, Colum McCann (in progress)*

Wind/Pinball, Haruki Murakami*

New and Collected Poems, Wislawa Szymborska

Beauty and Sadness, Yasunari Kawabata

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

I Curse the River of Time, Per Petterson*

Complete Poems of George Sefaris

Place of the Heart, Sigrun Sigursdottir*

On the Cold Coasts, Vilborg Davidsdottir*

Beneath the Ice: an Anthology of Contemporary Icelandic Poetry

Half a Life, V.S. Naipaul*

In a Free State, V.S. Naipaul*

A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul*

Man, Kim Thuy*

Hausfrau, Jill Alexander Essbaum*

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk*

What I Think About When I Think About Running, Haruki Murakami**

Living with a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenrich**

Glimmerglass, Marly Youmans

Night Fishing at Antibes, B. Anderson, T. Gilman, E. McNeal, and M. Sickler

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami*

DNFs:

Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

Bell of the Desert, Alan Gold

--

So, it was a year of reading Japanese novels, and contemporary Icelandic literature, with a big chunk of V.S. Naipaul thrown in. My fascination with the work of Haruki Murakami continues: the year began with his great recent novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage; I listened to his memoir about writing and running while working out last winter on the elliptical in our building's basement, and finally tackled "the big one": IQ84 this fall - and loved every minute of it; I could barely put it down. In December I read the recently-released English translations of his two earliest novellas. Murakami had been reluctant to have them translated and published, because he considers them to be warm-ups, written as he was finding his voice and before he developed his mature style. I agreed that they weren't up to the later standard, not at all, but they gave a fascinating glimpse into his own youth and some of the themes that he's returned to again and again, as well as test vehicles for the particular voice and style that characterizes his later novels, of which IQ84 is the masterpiece, a surrealistic tour-de-force that had me captivated and amazed from beginning to end.

I enjoyed reading books by friends, in particular the scary and beautifully-written Glimmerglass by Marly Youmans (Clive Hicks-Jenkins, illustrator and cover designer) vividly set in Cooperstown, a place I know quite well, and Night Fishing at Antibes, an experimental poetry collaboration and response to the Picasso painting, by Teresa Gilman and three other poets.

Knowing I was interested in Nordic writing and culture, my friend Ed recommended Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time. He told me he had picked it up mostly because he liked the title and said it wasn't a book he'd have normally liked, but he did - and so did I. It's a rather grim, dark story of a man who should be more adult than he is, his relationship with his mother, and the way he keeps making a hash of things; very well written and compelling, even though it makes you cringe.

Continuing the Nordic theme, I liked all three of the Icelandic books I read: an anthology of contemporary poetry, an historical novel, and a recent novel about a mother from Reykjavik, her delinquent daughter, her best friend (a flautist), and the trip the three of them take around the southern coast of Iceland - nearly the same route we were to follow a month later. This one, Places of the Heart, by Sigrun Sigursdottir, is a terrific book and deserving winner of recent Icelandic fiction awards. It gave me a look, beyond tourism and the lives of my own friends, into the seamier side of Icelandic culture, what it means for young people to be stuck on an island in the north Atlantic, and also the relationship they have with their astounding and dangerous landscape. The passages describing the land were lyrical, raw, loving, and real, and added immeasurably to my own experience when I stood in the same places myself - for instance, the book contains a harrowing trip across these same black glacial sands during a sandstorm.

The other big book of the year was V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, which I read with my friend Teju as he was preparing to write the introduction to a new edition published by Picador Classics. This is Naipaul's early masterpiece, a sweeping family saga, drawn from his own experiences as a young man growing up in post-colonial Trinidad. I was swept into the world of the novel - so unfamiliar to me - and it remains embedded in my consciousness. Best of all, the book contains little of the rage that mars so many of Naipaul's later works, so that his magnificent prose can simple be read and appreciated.

My most memorable book of the year, though, was 1968 Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness. Because of Murakami, I had been looking for other Japanese novels to read, and after trying and putting aside a couple of books by Kenzaburo Oe (either because I didn't feel caught up in the story or because the books were set elsewhere than Japan) began this one by Kawabata, who I had never read. It's a quiet book that contains a chilling story about human nature, desire, and jealousy, and I was gripped by it, aware that I was reading the work of an absolute master. I'd recommend this book to any lover of literature, and what I am looking forward to the most in 2016 is reading more of Kawabata's work.

Finally, I wanted to mention that I read or listened to a lot of books in 2015 through a relatively new library service called OverDrive. You sign up for an account through a participating library where you have a membership (I use the Bibliotheque nationale de Quebec) and this gives you access to a large and ever-expanding collection of English-language e-books and audio books, available for free download for a period of 21 days. It works beautifully; I tend to download the books to my phone and read them there, wherever I happen to be. It's great!

So...happy reading, and, as always, I'd love to hear about your own book list and favorites of the past year in the comments!

#theshortestdays (8)

The eerie wrongness of the attenuated fall, the inversion of the evening air, the desolate parks, the silent wait for snow that has refused to fall, until yesterday, from a warm sky.

Happy Christmas

Hans Memling, Virgin and Child Enthroned (detail) c.1480 - 1489 Oil on oak  Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany

It's been a year of thinking about Mary for me. This beautiful painting by Hans Memling reminds me of Berlin, where I was fortunate to see it; the swans in the background remind me of Iceland; and the book beside Mary reminds me of  how often books appear in paintings and poems about the Annunciation: even though the baby has appeared here, the book is still there, along with a lily (not shown in this detail), another symbol of Mary. Such a literate, refined, white baby and mother! At least most of us no longer harbor those illusions.

I'm finding it difficult to be truly happy this Christmas: there's too much pain in the world and in my own heart for me to forget all of that and just concentrate on my own many blessings, or on the pleasures of the moment. And actually, I'm glad that I can't; I think it's more realistic to try to hold both the darkness and light together as we walk, stumble, write, sing, paint, and talk our way forward.

The other night, before singing, my choir director and I shared a few moments together. He is a consummate musician, well-known in Canada as an organist and composer as well as a choir director, and it's been one of the great privileges of the last decade to be able to sing with him, watch him work in the organ loft, hear his playing, and to be friends. He's only a couple of years older than I am, and has been a staunch and interested supporter of my own artwork and writing. We spoke about the difficulty of the world we're living in, and how important we both feel it is to continue to work in the arts, to dedicate our lives to being creative and to doing the best work we can, at the highest level we can. We acknowledged how, as church musicians, we can never know who will have walked through the door, why they are there, or how the music may be able to touch them - but that we know that it often does. We talked about how difficult a climate it is, not only for liturgical music and classical music, but for all the arts right now, but that this makes it doubly important to persevere and just be strong and steady about what we do, in all our fields. And we spoke about how important it is, in such a climate, for younger people to see and know that there are people who happily and willingly devote their time and best efforts to the arts, in spite of the difficulties, whether or not they ever achieve great "success" in the eyes of the world - because that really is neither the point or the motivation that can sustain a whole life in music, or writing, or the visual arts.

I was grateful for that communion, and also for a moment with one of the young singers, at the very beginning of what I think will be a fine career in music, who told me how much it mattered to her to know people like my husband and me who have spent our lives in this work and are still excited about it, working hard, and pursuing new projects. And I, in my turn, look at a painting like the one at the top of this post, and see a lineage unfold: the dear friends with whom I saw it, my own mentors, and all the artists who came before me and kept working through their own dark periods of history and their own turbulent lives. What, after all, is this season about, but love -- love of one another, love of one's true work, and love of all that is noble, true, and beautiful? That's the light that shines through the centuries, always trying to make us realize we, we are the lamps.

 

#theshortestdays (5) and (6)

6.

"Hello, hello," says my dentist, bounding into the room and grasping my forearm with his warm hands. He spots my helmet on the window sill. "Still on your bike, I see." "Yes, that much is a good aspect of the weather!" "How's your mood these days," he asks; we're good friends and speak of such things. "I'm doing OK," I tell him. "You?" He shakes his head. "It's a struggle. When the leaves come off and it starts to get grey, in November, I can feel myself going down, down...I have to fight against it, every year. But we survive. Exercise every morning, good food, friends, love..." He's headed for Florida. I'm staying here; I'm used to it. But I think of those for whom these shortest days will be the only days, the last days, in this the dangerous season.

 

7.

Awake at five, thinking of those long gone, those far away, those nearby, those unknown.

 

#theshortestdays (4)

I'm trying to slow down, along with the year.

It's not easy for me. But this morning I soaked in a hot tub reading a Japanese novel, well past our usual departure time for work, while, in the next room, J. lay on the bed, reading Bolano. "Shall I wait for you to go up to the studio?" he asked. I had already checked the weather: gray, cold, pelting rain. "Yes," I said, "if you don't mind too much." "No, it's fine," he said, "maybe I'll go back to sleep, and in a few moments I heard fake snoring, and laughed. I became engrossed in the story: fifteen minutes, twenty-five. Then the voice from the next room announced, "I think I'll go on up," startling me out of my book-head. "No, no," I said, "it's OK, I'll finish up quickly," and plunged my hair under the water, beginning to hurry again.

There are cookies to bake, gifts to wrap, another rehearsal and evening of singing. Meanwhile the pendulum of natural time feels like it is coming to a still point. I try to listen to the stillness, but even now I hear ticking; perhaps it's just my own heart.

 

 

#theshortestdays (3)

At sunrise on the days near the solstice, pale winter light shines from the river across the city, across our terrace, into the living room, down the hall, into the bedroom, and all the way to the far wall.

The solstice sunrise also lines up directly with Papineau, the main "north-south" street we cross every day. Everyone knows that Montreal is not laid out on a north-south grid, and there's a local saying that it's the only city where the sun sets in the north, so far off-axis are the streets. I always thought the street arrangement grew as it did because of the natural orientation of the river and the island. Now I wonder if perhaps someone long ago actually did notice the sun's rays on the solstices, but I've never heard anyone but my husband say a word about it, as we wake on these shortest days in a bedroom that feels as if it should be hung with mistletoe to please the pagan gods.

#theshortestdays (2)

The number 10 bus stops at a corner, splashing through a puddle. It's a grey day in Montreal, unseasonably and wrongly warm for mid-December. You'd think this city of northern people would be happy, but instead there's a pervasive glumness in the demeanor of the pedestrians I watch through the grimy window, and in the silence of my fellow passengers, who stare at the floor. I try to amuse myself by translating every French sign I see, like this faded poster for a local beer, St Ambroise, in the window of a defunct depanneur: "Méfiez-vous des faux saints" - "beware of false saints." Across the intersection, a child stares out the window of a garderie, a pacifier in his mouth, waving at nothing.

We pass shrubs wrapped in burlap and white plastic, a mountain ash weighed down by heavy clusters of orange berries, a confused magnolia tree with fuzzy, swollen buds, soggy Christmas garlands hanging above Avenue Mont-Royal. The streets are wet and full of detritus: paper, wrappers, leaves. Teachers and nurses have been out on strike: there's a handpainted banner proclaiming "équité" stretched on someone's balcony, and the bedraggled strike banners tied to poles at the local provincial health clinic drip with water. At the Gilford community garden the still-green plots look more like they usually do in early April, and the picnic tables piled on top of one another seem ready to be unstacked and used again. As if to concur with the seasonal confusion, a red sign on a separatist's porch reads, "Oui! le Quebec, mon pays" (Yes! Quebec, my country") with a daisy for the "O" in "oui."

I think of Mexico City: the constant sound of vendors hawking their goods, of street musicians and boom boxes, the riot of bright colors, the more-or-less constant warmth, the young lovers who can't keep their hands off each other because they're finally alone and anonymous on the bus or metro. Here, a girl with pink hair and a nose ring gets on with her boyfriend. They're both in studded black, decked in chains and covered with tattoos, listening to their own headphones. They don't even hold hands, but if it were April, they'd act differently: in the spring, sun-starved Montrealers of every social persuasion peel off their clothes and practically go naked.

We northern people don't know what to do without our seasons; like the budded trees, it throws us not to have a cold December, ice on the outdoor hockey rinks, and snow for Christmas. So we swelter in our parkas and tuques and scarves, feel affronted by the holiday music coming from invisible loudspeakers, and grumble because Christmas shopping in warm weather feels like a chore instead of a pleasure. There's one advantage though: In spite of the posters advertising medicines for "la saison de la grippe," no one on the bus is coughing: even the germs are confused.

#theshortestdays (1)

Snow geese in a field near Lake Champlain (2010)

Outside Plattsburgh, agitation in a light gray sky. We pass a large stand of trees, and come upon a field nearly covered with white, its dark furrows filled with the stocky bodies of snow geese. Above the cornfield, the geese rise, wheel and settle in groups of hundreds out of a congregation of thousands. It reminds me of something, and I finally realize it's the motion of rice grains as I wash them, my hand swirling the water into a clockwise vortex.

Once I made a journey to Cap Tourmente, on the estuary of the St. Lawrence, the famed staging area for the snow goose migration. Thousands upon thousands of geese stop there every year on their way between the Arctic and their wintering grounds in the Chesapeake. We had timed our trip to coincide with the usual peak of the migration but that year we arrived ahead of the geese, and saw only a dozen or so, far off in the salt marshes, and a few taxidermy specimens in flight in the interpretive building's dioramas.

So this is the largest number of snow geese I've ever seen, and because we're on the highway, we can't stop, can't hear, can't photograph, can only try to commit the sight to memory. On our own journey back north, three days later, J. has his camera on his lap, but the geese have moved on.

Small Packages: making the "occasional" illustrations for Annunciation

Every book project presents unique design challenges. As the poems began to arrive for Annunciation, I quickly realized that a major issue would be finding the right balance of illustrations to poems. The project had begun with a large, almost-square image, and I planned to do others in a similar format, each taking up a page on its own.

These new images developed as I read and thought about the poems: the one above arose because several of the poets referred to Renaissance paintings that depict Mary reading a book.

Once I had completed half a dozen prints and laid them out with the poems on the pages, spacing them out through the book, this number seemed about right: the six large, full-page relief prints were graphic, with strong solid black areas. They needed to contrast with the more delicate typography and generous white space on the facing pages, but not overpower the words.

An early "test" layout, above -- this image ended up paired with a different poem.

But there were further considerations. Some poets would be represented by a single poem, others by as many as four, and the poems were of varying lengths, but every author had taken the project seriously and put their minds and hearts into it. It was very important to me for each poet to have some art on their pages. It was already September, and I was running out of time: I couldn't complete sixteen full-page illustrations, one for each poet, and I felt that would be too many pages of art in any case.  I had already done a few smaller illustrations. It seemed to me that these  "occasional" or "spot" illustrations would augment the text, extend the art onto more pages, and complement the words and their meaning.

The first small illustrations I had created were fairly realistic and representational, like this white rose:

 

But as the project progressed, the illustrations had becoming more graphic and abstract, and this direction pleased me. Now I wondered what motifs would lend themselves to the subject, but also allow some abstraction? Leaves? Berries?

These blocks yielded illustrations in several sizes, and by scanning the prints I was able to flip them horizontally and vertically, or to rotate and scale them to extend their usefulness. 

Then I thought of olives, and their long, thin leaves. I played around with that subject, doing a minimum of preliminary drawing, and just carving freely. I had liked the "dotty" areas in the previous attempts, and went for that more intentionally:

 

One of these olive images became the basis for the book's endpapers, a crash design effort that was necessary for a last-minute technical reason.

Those endpapers ended up being one of my favorite parts of the whole design -- I'll talk about that in another post.

(I'm giving away an original 8"x8" print (at left) to one of the Annunciation buyers, chosen at random: if you'd like to enter, please put your name in the "December Giveaway" box on the order form. If you've already bought a book, you will be automatically entered. Here's the link for more information on the book and ordering.)