Category: in memorium

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Update – July 7th

A slightly bitter-tasting but substantial smörgåsbord for you today, dear reader…

  1. The last week and-a-bit has been a little hard on me. Found out over a week ago that a good work-friend I hadn’t been in touch with for a couple of years had passed away in his sleep. By the time I’d found out, the memorial had already happened. Everything that could be done or said had been done and said. And so, one has no choice in this situation but to simply accept the fact that, like it or not, sad or happy, the last chapter in a sub-plot has been written without my consent or input. I think the thing which upsets me most about sudden deaths is the lack of control. I’ve had relatives who have died of cancer or carried on weakly after a stroke, and it was clear to everyone that the pen nib of fate was scratching out the last bits of their narrative; as the living bereaved, we had time to digest what was happening in our own way. With Trent – my friend and workmate – I was left with nothing but the unavoidable metric truth of his death.


  2. Foolishly, perhaps owing to my Chinese astrological tendencies (Dog), I’ve been patiently waiting for a response from a Toronto lit mag to get back to me on a short fiction submission I’d mailed to them almost a year ago. Owing to fatigue, I finally emailed the editor last week, only to find out from his response that “We would have responded to that a very long time ago, so I’m assuming it got lost in the mail/E-mail. I’m also assuming it was our response that got lost, and not your submission, as the title sounds familiar. “. So, in other words, I’d wasted a year not submitting the (admittedly solid) piece elsewhere. This upset me to no end. Nobody likes to be rejected – something I’ve accustomed myself to – but in this case I was left wondering whether they’d actually bothered to send anything out. I don’t lose incoming mail, nor is my email spam filter so prejudiced as to reject anything addressed directly to me (unless of course they put something like “rejection letter for Cialis” in the subject header). I drank a lot that night and complained bitterly to friends who consoled me, particularly those who caught my Facebook status message: “Matt wonders what could be worse than finding out a form rejection letter with your name on it got lost in the mail.”


  3. Not willing to let “the shit” (he says, in the collective sense) get me down, I continued to revise the novel, having finished going through to the (current) ending, thus completing my first full pass on the book as a whole. I immediately went back to the beginning, which I’d barely looked at in months, and started full-revision #2. I think it’s coming together nicely, and the feedback I’ve received on excerpts given to my peers in the writing group I run have been very positive. I just wish there was someone I could bribe in order to get one of my short fiction pieces published, because it’s a bit of a hindrance approaching an editor with a novel having a big fat “0” in the previously-published department. I’m also looking at doing more story submissions to non-Canadian publishers, as I find the atmosphere in this country a little stifling. Make of that what you will.


  4. A good tonic for these doldrums was to be had when my wife and I took a drive through the Niagara peninsula (after an absurdist trip to Niagara Falls – don’t bother asking – thankfully, we had two good friends to help us drink away the memories). We both love wine, and as firm supporters of Canadian wineries it was great to get out (only an hour’s drive from the city) and see the vinyards, the countryside, and quaff vast amounts of the best vino North America has to offer. So much so, in fact, that I’ve considered starting a new blog specifically geared towards Canadian wine. We shall see.
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May (pt. 2: My City Was Gone)

“I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls
Said, a, o, oh way to go Ohio”

– Chrissie Hynde

May was a time for me to explore: my self, my past, what has changed, what hasn’t. As all things similar, it starts with necessary rhetoric and then is up to the tenaciousness of the individual to sort out.

I rented a car and drove to Brantford.

I don’t have a hometown; our family moved much too much for me to lay claim to such a thing. Yet, if pressed, I will say Brantford, Ontario. Technically, we didn’t even live in Brantford proper, but rather on the outskirts, off a rural highway, where we had a house which stood near the bank of the Grand River, on the edge of Onondaga Township.

It was here where I spent my childhood years, which I’m only able to accurately map in terms of school rather than age or calendar time (Grades 3 through 8, to be exact). As regards my family life, this was the part which I sometimes refer to bittersweetly as The Camelot Years. We lived in a big, red brick Victorian house detached from the world, with a huge apple orchard behind us and acreage aplenty. Eventually, my father took advantage of a small barn on our property and we ended up owning hens, and subsequently more fresh eggs and Macintosh apples than we knew what to do with. I could go on, but you get the point.

School was another matter. To quickly summarize my scholastic life, I didn’t have a very good time until college. Part of this can be blamed on the cruelty of youth(s). Part of this can be blamed on me being who I was. Part of this can be blamed (if one could really use such a word) on the simple complexities of life and the logistics of time.

I went to find my old school – the last place I remember seeing my classmates who I loved and hated. I drove. I drove more (faster). Went back over my tracks, wondering if my memory had betrayed me.

It hadn’t. It was gone: Onondaga-Brant Public School was no longer there. Instead, the smaller one, the place I’d spent my introductory Grades 3 and 4 was still standing; furthermore, the town had renamed it from Brant Public School to the same moniker as the one I was searching for in vain.

In other words, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know – the one might as well have swallowed the other. I took pictures of what remained – the imposter school – and later found out from my mother that it too was slated to go. It really couldn’t be more metaphoric.

I drove by our old house, thankfully still standing, but of course everything around it has changed. The cattle barn on the property beside us had been replaced by several ugly houses, sitting there as if defying the logic of the land. The palatial (to the eyes of a child) homestead on the other side – the Bournes’ house, as we knew it then – is now a yoga retreat.

I went to capture something I didn’t quite know, me being an older version of the child who oscillated between having the best and worst times of his life there, and in the end I left it all with a handful of photographs and an emptier heart.

I drove into downtown Brantford and visited my grandmother’s grave, something I promised myself I would do on my own, without my mother’s prompting or my inability to schedule enough time on family visits. I knelt by her stone, having bought some long-stemmed roses, and spoke to her quietly.

The truth is that when we moved away long ago – to Alberta of all places – everything in Brantford went to shit. Two major manufacturing plants went bankrupt, laying off thousands. The city council then approved the replacement of the central downtown square with an Eaton’s Centre (a giant, ugly suburban mall placed in the middle of a beautiful classic town as if to clearly defy logic). It bombed and still sits there half-empty as a textbook lesson for how not to plan a city, Brantford now trying to dig itself up from “ghost town” status. There is a telemarketing centre in the mall; those people who call you from the 519 area-code during dinner are calling from Brantford.

It pained us to move away, but – similar to what happened a few years later when we abandoned Stony Plain, Alberta – it was probably a good decision no matter how difficult it was for my brother and I to swallow.

I drove home from Brantford, and on leaving felt closer to the past if not in full agreement with how it has shaped me, nor with the terms on which I am to live with it. I live in Toronto, but in some respects I think I’ll always feel rootless; grasping for something which historically has always been pulled away from me, even if for good intentions.

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…

As if the horrific fire which afflicted the Queen West and Bathurst-area earlier this year weren’t bad enough, I found myself today doing errands in those parts and, expecting to see the tobacco store – Westside Tobacco on the northeast corner – with its trademark wooden “Indian” out by the sidewalk, I instead happened upon a closed shop with a candlelit memorial in front of the entrance.

I looked up again and saw notes posted by the community on the windows and on the door. It didn’t take much time for the tone of the notes to surrender the truth, that the owner was dead.

A note I read, the one which carried the most context for me, was printed from this blog.

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RIP: William F. Buckley Jr.

I don’t qualify myself as belonging to either the left or right side of the political spectrum; if the spectrum had a third dimension I would probably have a better time finding my alignment there. Regardless, while I didn’t subscribe or agree with Mr. Buckley’s politics, I admired his mind and the forthright intelligence he brought to televised debate.

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Requiem For a Pariah: Bobby Fischer

I read the news last night and saw that Bobby Fischer had passed away. Like many people who were familiar with his life and accomplishments, there was mix of surprise, disappointment, and (sadly) relief.

Fischer was the yin/yang of fame and fortune – in his youthful prime, the greatest chess player who ever walked the earth, and in the years that followed, an increasingly paranoid, hateful, and divisive man.

He embodied the so-called American Dream: a lower-class kid who started playing competitive chess by the age of 8, to become an International Grandmaster by the age of 15. The highlight of his career was winning the 1972 world championship against then-Soviet opponent Boris Spassky in Reykjavík, Iceland. He was the first American to win the championship in over a century and, in light of the Cold War, was embraced as a hero by millions of people around the world. As a chess player, Fischer was imaginative, often employing so-called “traditional” moves in new ways. He closed down his opponents mercilessly.

The problem, which certainly did not begin late in life, was that he was a sheltered, neurotic, perhaps even mentally unbalanced individual. It wasn’t enough for him to control the chessboard: he demanded that everything about his playing environments be to his standards, which often meant no cameras, no illustrators, no televisions. He lived most of his life in reclusion, eventually leaving the United States (persecuted for playing chess in Yugoslavia while it was under embargo) to live throughout Europe and the Asian Pacific. He became an ex-pat with a paranoia streak. He became infamous for radio interviews he gave in the Philippines, denouncing conspiracies which were often anti-Semitic in nature. In short, he was a mess. I’ve read some of the transcripts (I didn’t want to believe it when I’d first heard), and it pretty much destroyed any respect I had for the man. I’m only thankful he wasn’t organized enough to start a militia.

He died of unknown causes on the same island which was the scene of his greatest triumph – Iceland. In this there is some dark poetry to be written. About heroes. About the duality of an unparallelled tenacity. But dark still. Very dark.

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RIP: Jane Jacobs

“The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.”
– Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006


From CBC News:

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning.

Jane Jacobs, shown in 2004, influenced a generation of urban planners with her critiques about North American urban renewal policies. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89.

Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a generation.

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Penn., Jacobs had made her home in Canada since the late 1960s.

Educated at Columbia University, she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs, at the Office of War Information in New York, where she began writing during the war.

Known for protesting sprawl

The strong themes of her writing and activism included opposition to expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban planning, saying they were killing inner cities and discouraging the economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

Inspired ‘Ideas That Matter’ gathering

Jacobs settled in Toronto in 1969. There she supported developments such as the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, an inner-city development for people of all income levels.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, which led to a book of the same name.

Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead is “a grave warning to a society losing its memory,” jurists said in awarding her the $15,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2005.

“In spare, exquisite prose, Jane Jacobs alerts us to the dangers facing the family, higher education, science and technology, the professions, and fiscal accountability. Drawing on history, geography, and anthropology, this book reflects a lifetime of study and observation, offering us lessons to avoid decline,” the jury said.

Dark Age Ahead finds comparisons between our current North American culture and European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages.

Interviewed by Canadian Press when she won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, Jacobs said, “People really know themselves that the dark age is ahead. They’re worried, and they haven’t articulated it, but they feel it.”

“I think it’s late but we don’t need to go down the drain,” she said. “But we will if we aren’t aware. It’s a cautionary book.”

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Rest in Peace: Stanislaw Lem

From Reuters:
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Solaris author Stanislaw Lem dies at 84
Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:34 AM ET

KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters) – Polish author Stanislaw Lem, one of the world’s leading science-fiction writers, died on Monday in his home city of Krakow at the age of 84 after a battle with heart disease.

Lem, whose books have sold more than 27 million copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages, won widespread acclaim for The Cyberiad, stories from a mechanical world ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974.

Solaris, published in 1961 and set on an isolated space stations, was made into a film epic 10 years later by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and into a 2002 Hollywood remake shot by Steven Sodebergh and starring George Clooney.

“Shortly after 3 p.m. (1300 GMT) Stanislaw Lem died in the heart clinic, where he had been treated over the past few weeks for circulatory problems,” Andrzej Kulig, director of the Jagiellonian University hospital told Reuters.

Lem, born on September 12, 1921 in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, studied medicine before World War Two. After the war, communist censorship blocked the publication of his earliest writing.

After the fall of communism in 1989 Lem ceased writing science-fiction, instead devoting himself to reports on near-future predictions for governments and organizations.

He wrote essays on computer crime, as well as technological and ethical problems posed by the expansion of the Internet.

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As mentioned earlier this month, it is from an eponymous Lem book that I gave this blog the name Imaginary Magnitude.

I can only muster two thoughts:
1) Damn it.
2) Bless him.

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