Thin Air

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Last week, which seems a long while ago already, was Thin Air week in Winnipeg. Thin Air is the city’s annual writers festival. I was honored to have a small part in the event, with a campus reading of This Hidden Thing, but mostly the week was about listening to and engaging with a great variety of other writers from across the country. As the event’s subtitle says, “it’s for readers.”

I took in four of the evening events, and two of the afternoon book chats. Here’s a few highlights.

From the festival opener, a line by Ismaila Alfa, traffic reporter for CBC Radio and poet/musician:

Long live the figures of speech before and after me.

Long live indeed, figures of speech!

Since I'm not much of a coffee drinker, my sleek Thin Air mug has top spot as pens and pencils holder.

The festival featured many wonderful writers and their books, and I hate to single some out, but… I enjoyed hearing Richard B. Wright (perhaps best known for his Clara Callan), whose new book is Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard. Wright had some interesting things to say about how he works, including the comment that reading poetry unblocks him when he’s stuck, reinvigorates him. And, finding myself once again involved in the terror and joy of a new novel project, I certainly  resonated with what Wright said about that:

You’re sitting in a room talking to yourself — it’s almost a form of madness… You hope what you’re indulging in will be liked and indulged by others… [But] I seem to need another life. A writer needs this other imaginary world.

And the books I’d like to read because of the festival? Wright’s, yes, and also David Bergen’s latest, The Matter with Morris, which landed on the Giller prize long list as the week opened. Opening reviews have praised it and the passage Bergen read from it intrigued me. (Another festival author and Winnipegger who made the long list is Joan Thomas, but I’ve already read her Curiosity, so I’m up at least one!) I’m also looking forward to Sandra Birdsell’s new book, Waiting for Joe.

Every time I attend readings I realize again what a pleasure it is to listen to ideas and words crafted with care. Poetry, especially, shines when read aloud; the genre almost requires an oral presentation. Novels are trickier to judge from their performance, I think, because they turn and deepen on extended development. But the fragments we hear are an invitation, and we honor authors when we take them up on it.

Herculean effort (2)

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If memory is the problem — carrying on from yesterday’s post — it may be the solution as well — the solution, I mean, to the dis-ease with the changes in our lives and their new temptations.

(I’m setting aside — for now, to focus on now — speculations about how younger and future generations may adapt, how “singlemindedness,” as Alan Jacobs puts it, will test and/or play out for them…)

The path I see may or may not be herculean, but is certainly connected to memory. It’s the path of sabbath-keeping. Nothing particularly original about this; it’s also a current conversation. (See, for example, this at Rumblings.) But it makes sense. Taking sabbath breaks, weekly or in bigger chunks in occasional “sabbaticals,” may be motivated for some of us by memory of pre-internet days, but these will then produce fresh memories of the experience of freedom.

How sabbath-keeping in relation to internet technologies might unfold in practice will surely vary from person to person. I’ve been inspired in my own (fumbling) attempts at it by Marva J. Dawn’s Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: ceasing, resting, embracing, feasting. (I come at sabbath from a spiritual perspective, but the work-rest rhythm is important, I think, whether a person is religious or not.)

It seems significant to me that the command about the sabbath is the only one of the ten with “remember” in it. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy… We take a break, shut down, turn off, read and connect in other ways, rest.

The space in which we turned out backs on strivings technological and internet-driven will be unique. We’ll remember the day, be strengthened to come back to that place again.

In the renewed practice of an old-fashioned habit like sabbath, we may be able to keep the memory of a kind of singlemindedness alive.

Herculean effort (1)

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I was struck by the phrase “herculean amount of self-control” in reference to what it takes to live and work the way we used to before the internet. It’s over at Alan Jacobs’ blog, Text Patterns, which considers “technologies of reading, writing, research, and knowledge.” The specific context of the phrase (which is found in the comments) is a personal reflection from Jacobs’ friend who’s taking a sabbatical from blogging. This allowed him to sink into reading for an extended time, to give himself over to it, all of which, he says, had become rare in his life.

Conversations like this are ubiquitous in our culture. We’re aware that things have changed, and how drastically — in the way we read, in the way we pay (or don’t pay) attention. It worries us, of course.

It seems to me that the notion that self-control in these matters is both necessary and good (Hercules being a hero, after all) is largely motivated by memory. Isn’t it? It’s those of us who have lived long enough to remember what it’s like to be absorbed in a book at length, to work with singular focus, to not be restless over essentially minuscule concerns such as whether there’s a new message or tweet or status line to read, who try to fight back.

The change is real, and so are the memories. The effort to return is therefore herculean. Confession: I know the siren call of  “is there something new?” The aimless wandering and clicking to seek it. It’s like a nervous tic. I also remember yesteryear’s rituals of once-a-day mail delivery, the once-a-day newspaper, the expectation that if I need to be interrupted, the telephone will ring. I know the difference between those habits, those interruptions, and this compulsive distraction. Or, at least, the temptation to distraction. It annoys me that barely ten or fifteen minutes into reading a wonderful book I’m getting itchy to check something on the computer, to move my mouse over the desk to bring the screen to life, to click on something. It annoys me that resisting this (because there’s nothing I need, really need, there at the moment) is such hard work.

But maybe, as I said, it’s the memory that’s the problem and when old ways are forgotten, the discomfort will disappear as well. Perhaps subsequent generations, those who grow up with these new habits, will adapt just fine. They’ll be what they’re accustomed to being. They won’t need to expend effort in something they didn’t know, and thus don’t remember, any more than we expend effort in reading scrolls instead of books or staging family dramas in our houses instead of turning on the television.

More tomorrow….