Category Archives: Books

March notes

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Besides resolving to appear here monthly in 2025, I had a second New Year’s resolution: to read Moby-Dick. Which I have just accomplished, thus plugging one of many holes in my education. It wasn’t exactly a page-turner (not to mention there are a lot of pages to turn) so I read it alongside other books, aiming for two chapters a day. But I enjoyed it. I learned a great deal about whales and whaling, and was carried along by Captain Ahab’s mad quest for the White Whale and by Ishmael’s erudite and often humourous voice. About the latter, Alfred Kazin says:

But the most remarkable feat of language in the book is Melville’s ability to make us see that man [sic] is not a blank slate passively open to events, but a mind that constantly seeks meaning in everything it encounters.

Speaking of meaning, I commend to you a link that young friend Chris Friesen included in a comment to last month’s post, in which I talked about the present “moment.” It’s a sermon he preached at the church we attended in Winnipeg.  He weaves together his love of bugs, coming to the edge of meaning, and the strange scriptural book of Ecclesiastes. His conclusion has stuck with me: “the moment becomes the site of meaning.” It’s worth a read.

I think I mentioned some time ago that I have a new book of short fiction coming up, for publication next spring, with Freehand Books. I’m in the edits stage now, and have just gone through the manuscript again and sent it back to my editor. With that task done, I was able to welcome, with an unfettered schedule, my daughter and her wife and two children, who returned to B.C. from their new digs in Nova Scotia this week to celebrate their wedding, which actually took place five years ago but during Covid and thus minus the intended public celebration. All my children and grandchildren will be together for that, and we’re looking forward to it.

And, this month, two additional books to mention. I’m not Catholic, but I admire Pope Francis and I’m enjoying Hope, his recent autobiography. There’s a warm lively aspect to his recollections, also honesty about “errors and sins,” as well as an embrace of sentiment as “a cherished value: not to be afraid of feeling.” I remember following the election of a new pope in 2013, after Benedict’s resignation, scanning the various possibilities and so on. I checked back in my journal to see what I’d recorded (and see that I wrote in the second person, as I do now and then):

…you feel you should see where matters stand with the Vatican conclave. Well. The white smoke has billowed forth, not 10 minutes ago. So you join Peter Mansbridge (CBC) to watch live, and who is it? The one you hoped for from that list of 20 [in the newspaper], the man from Argentina, and on what basis did you hope? Well none are anything but traditional but there was a note, wasn’t there, of openness to women? On that basis. He is a Jesuit, of pastoral personality and warmth, simple habits, etc. What you’re reading seems affirming. It’s a surprise, of course; he was not in the upper group of likelies. He’s 76. Latin Americans are thrilled.

Actually, women’s position in Catholicism has not changed much, as far as I know, but I’m only about a third in so perhaps he will comment on it further in. (Here’s the Guardian review.) Another book I’m reading is the graphic edition of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. The illustrations by Nora Krug add power to Snyder’s 20 points; the whole thing is just incredibly relevant.

What I did today (Jan. 20)

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The sun rose as usual this Monday morning, with a gentle coral hue that turned briefly pinker and then resolved into the yellowish cast of regular sunshine. Not a regular Monday morning, though, I remembered as soon as I woke. I couldn’t help it: my brain was like an alarm clock, signalling that the inauguration would soon be underway in Washington D.C. I’d already decided that, like Michelle Obama, I would not attend, though of course I had no invitation to do so in person, only the voracious maw of television inviting me in. 

It wasn’t that hard, actually, to resist the watching. I find it deeply unpleasant to see or hear the new president; I won’t bother rehearsing the reasons. But not thinking about it at all, well, that was harder. But I had my coffee, did my morning reading, ate breakfast, began to tackle today’s tasks.

High on the list was the need to dust. I’m very happy in my Tsawwassen apartment but honestly, I’ve never lived in a place (besides the Chaco of Paraguay in the season of wind) that gets dusty as quickly as this one, dust particles rising from the open rail cars of coal coming to the nearby port, I’ve been told, and of course when it’s beautifully sunny like today, the dust layers are even more obvious. So I did that, and I vacuumed too, and also, I attended a Livestream event with Rebecca Solnit and some guests, deliberately scheduled for this day. It scarcely referenced what was happening (besides the comment that the empty Washington Mall seemed a metaphor), but offered analysis and ideas about moving forward. She and her guests talked about resistance with tenderness, choosing a world of abundance rather than scarcity, spending time with art and music. One said, “Despair is a room we move through,” and another, in the words of the spiritual, “Ain’t gonna let nobody steal my joy.” All this and more. It was encouraging. (It can be viewed on YouTube as “The Way We Get Through This is Together.”)

While listening, I was working on a jigsaw puzzle. Puzzling is when I listen to podcasts or the like. One favourite is the CBC podcast “Front Burner,” a daily short (less than half an hour) conversation with an expert about some issue in the news. A podcast I’ve recently discovered is “What Matters Most” with host John Martens. There are more than 50 episodes to select from, including fascinating matters such as “Reading gender in Revelation” and “Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul.” When I walk, my podcast of choice is “This American Life,” stories that fill up about an hour, the perfect length for a walk. 

It’s still January, so perhaps I can mention that while I don’t generally make resolutions, I did determine to read Melville’s Moby-Dick this year, and I’m doing it, two chapters a day, and quite enjoying it. Other books I’ve read recently and warmly recommend are Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Clara Reads Proust by Stephane Carlier, and Clear by Carlys Davies. And I’m through Part V of Jon Fosse’s 7-part Septology, which might not be to everyone’s taste, but which I find strangely mesmerizing and compelling.

And since it’s still January, I wish you all a very happy New Year.

How did YOU spend this (historically significant) Monday?

The mysterious Irene P., etc.

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Earlier this month, I was a panelist at a Delta Literary Arts Society (DLAS) event here in Tsawwassen, with writers Raoul Fernandez, Debra Purdy Kong, and S.J. Kootz. Along with an honorarium, each of us was gifted a book from “the abandoned library” of a woman known as Irene P.; mine was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. “Do books long for a new owner?” asks a note pasted into the flyleaf. Assuming they do, “Just such a case has brought this book to you… once one of thousands in a collection owned by one Irene P.”

I asked the event organizer about her. She didn’t know much beyond the fact that when the woman’s house sold, there were thousands (6000, did she say?) books left behind, and hundreds about writing which somehow came to the DLAS and are used as unique thank yous. With all that advice on her shelves, did Irene P. write? I don’t know that either; hers is a story still to be told perhaps, but at any rate, I now have her 1995 edition of the Lamott classic, and it gives me pleasure. Since I already own the book, I’ll pass my copy on to someone else. And I think I’ll see if I can’t get more information about our mysterious donor.

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Speaking of writing advice, I recently read a small (80 pages) book by Stephen Marche called On Writing and Failure. Marche is no slouch, he’s written books and essays for all kinds of prestigious magazines, but he’s honest about the reality of the life: rejection. He kept track of them, he says, until they reached 2000, and hardly notices any more. He offers examples from other writers, and the point of it is not the promise of some inevitable arc to success, but his subtitle: On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. The book is full of quotable quotes:

English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: Submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.

In an environment where some 300,000 books are printed yearly in the U.S. alone, and only a few hundred of those are what could be called creative or financial successes, there’s certainly no urgency for anyone to join the ranks. But if one’s there already, nothing for it, he says,81l-0zGg3GL._SY522_ but to keep at it, to keep submitting the work. “No whining,” he insists repeatedly. “The desire to make meaning…is a valid desire despite the inevitability of defeat.”

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And, speaking of small but profound books, Sue Sorensen’s new poetry book, Acutely Life (At Bay Press), is an absolute delight. Whether she’s considering Freud or a musician or art or gardening/marriage or Mary the mother of Jesus, Sorensen registers on the page with both brilliant wit and deep emotional insight. Somewhere I read (though I can’t find the exact quote), one doesn’t interpret poetry as much as experience it. That’s how it’s been reading this book. I intend to read/experience it again.AcutleyLifeCover_(1)_800_1257_90