![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
These currents pull us 'cross the border
So. Vancouver. A summary. Mostly bastardized from travel e-mails to various people, but I might as well have them all in one place. I am beginning to re-emerge.
Saturday, you have read some about. For as long as I have known him, which is just over eleven years now, Mike has carried around with him a personal sphere of anachronism, generally centered on the 1930's-to-'40's; therefore it does not really surprise me that he lives in a boarding house, nor that my room had a gas fire.1 His cat, however, is as timeless as most cats are, and it's not her fault that a previous owner named her PussPuss. Taxonomically, she must be a calico, but in practice she's mostly a deep brushy fox-rust with soft patches of pure black on her face and a few bits of white thrown in as if for afterthoughts; her eyes are the kind of gold that verges on alcoholic, one of them darker-flecked. I had been warned she was skittish. Mike said he'd never seen her take to anyone as quickly as to me. I came back to my room and turned the fire up and finished reading Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire, the next-to-last of the books I'd brought with me from Boston. Jane Gardam's God on the Rocks (1978) and Philip Kemp's Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick had gotten me through Minneapolis, Tony Kushner's Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays and Bryher's Visa for Avalon to Vancouver. I dozed some, but not as much as I would have liked: I was stuck next to a textbook trio of ugly Americans on the international flight, which was sort of existentially depressing as well as loud. I slept, on Pacific Standard Time, surprisingly well.
Sunday was an illustration in the hazards of visiting clergy: somebody died, so there went the afternoon and Mike's day off. We still had time for lunch at the market on Granville Island before he had to meet with the family; I ate a Cornish pasty with my feet up on some gull-covered rocks, looking out the boats on False Creek and the mountains behind the Granville Street Bridge. It had rained gustily the night I got in from Boston, but three out of the five days I was in town were beautiful: about as brisk and damp as Boston in November, but the difference in latitude made all the light feel later in the year. Huge masses of white and shell-colored clouds built up over the sea. There was a busker singing "Wild Mountain Thyme." At the synagogue, Mike did the intake while I camped out in an armchair and read the first half of Sholem Aleichem's Blonzhende shtern2 (1911); and while it really was unnecessary, I understand why he apologized to me for the trip so far, because after dinner we went to a Kristallnacht memorial. I should somewhere have the program, although it may have disappeared into a backpack or a book. There was a scholarly lecture by a Dr. Reva Adler, an introduction by the mayor of Vancouver, and Mike sang. Afterward we stayed up talking. That's one of the reasons I do not regret this trip.
Monday, it was decided the most efficient thing would be for me to accompany Mike to his various appointments before the funeral; and since this got me an introduction to his voice teacher and a morning spent at a used book store, I have no complaints. Thanks to the Ambleside Book Barn, I spent the rest of the trip (and some of the last few days) reading Anna Massey's Telling Some Tales (2006), Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map (2002), and Byron Rogers' The Last Englishman: A Biography of J.L. Carr (2003), which the proprietor personally handed me after I'd asked him about Carr's non-A Month in the Country novels. I cannot find a link for the Savary Island Pie Company, but a slice of their salmon pie was delicious and kind of astonishingly English, Pacific Northwest notwithstanding. The funeral was in Richmond. The highway ran straight through salt marshes where I saw three blue herons by the side of the road and towering reefs of cloud wherever there weren't mountains. I wish I had been allowed to bury my grandmother when she died, not merely throw in a handful of dirt I can barely remember. We got back and met Mike's girlfriend for dinner at the excellent India Bistro. This may have been the day on which I realized I had taken photographs of barely anyone or anything at all.3
Tuesday, we had been planning to do the Grouse Grind, but it was raining in a mild, unmalicious, immovable kind of way, so instead we spent the morning at the Museum of Anthropology—which had renovated since I was last there, something like ten years ago—and the afternoon walking the six miles of Stanley Park's seawall in rain-light and dark scatterings of eider ducks and cargo ships out in the bay. There were starfish on the nearer rocks, urchin-purple and scalding red under the rain-scarred water. On the recommendation of Mike's girlfriend, we returned home by way of MacLeod's Books, where she said scenes from The Neverending Story had been filmed. I don't know about that, but I left with Volume III of the Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov (trans. Paul Schmidt, 1998) and a hardcover reprint of H.D.'s Palimpsest (1926). There was a first edition of Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), but not that I had fifty dollars for. I wish I could remember the name of the video store Mike took me to after his haftorah class,4 because it had things like a wall of Czech film. We ended up renting Arnaud Desplechin's Rois et reine (2004), which had been on the syllabus of the class I TA'd at Yale where I got to lecture on Atanarjuat and the Iliad.
And on Wednesday, in the endlessly opening kind of light that belongs to the year as it falls away, we got up and drove to Whistler Mountain and hiked a trail that led above the snowline, through thousand-year-old cedars. I don't write a lot about forests, or about mountains. They are landscapes that make me hungry, the same as the sea. Especially old forests, full of moss and lichen and the cold smell of bark; especially forests in autumn or winter, the Ice Age forests that I imagined in seventh grade from The Clan of the Cave Bear or from Robert Holdstock in college. I had a little of them when my brothers' godparents lived in Colorado, when I visited![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schreibergasse and G in New Hampshire this summer. Here were trees my height across, some fallen and rotting into faces, some still doing Etemenanki. Snow everywhere, ice and overgrown. I do not know for whom there was a cache of small cairns beside the trail, although one of them was a lot more like a herm. We had to leave before it got dark, but it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had that week. That far north and near the sea, I think, is a region of the world I could love.
Thursday was travel. Mike's landlady, who is Mennonite from Paraguay, sent me off with as many McVitie's fruit bars as she thought I could eat and a bar of milk chocolate only slightly smaller than Lichtenstein. Mostly on the flight back I read Russian futurism. I've kind of been in a state of crash ever since, with time out for reading Thomas the Tank Engine to a five-year-old. I'm really not built for Eastern Standard Time.
1. The most striking thing is that it's not even self-reinforcing. He gets given flat caps and tweed jackets by people who barely know him. I mean, he owns modern clothes: T-shirts, sweatshirts; I think he's got windbreaker pants on in the photographs I took on Whistler Mountain. One of his congregants still donated him a Greek fisherman's cap on Wednesday.
2. The title is conventionally rendered as Wandering Stars, but a closer version would be Stars Astray—think farblondzhet, lost, off course, all mixed up. It's a tragicomic novel of the Yiddish theater and two lovers who never quite find one another and I think it might have been much more romantic and sentimental had it been written a decade earlier with Stempenyu (1888) and Yossele solovey (1889); instead, it's deeply skeptical of the world in which its characters move and even of its protagonists, ostensibly the innamorati at the heart of this zhargon-commedia. I liked it very much.
3. It's been established that I have the instinct for writing about whatever happens to me, but I am completely missing the one that makes you pull out a camera phone for the Rally to Restore Sanity or a nice angle of the sky. Unless I remind myself specifically to take pictures of a trip, it doesn't happen. Sometimes I remind myself specifically and it still doesn't happen. There may be photographs from this trip forthcoming, assuming it's still possible to develop the film on which they were taken.
4. They thought I was a ringer. It is true that I don't know haftorah trope, but since I learned Torah trope once in thirteen days, it was a fair guess.
I can't remember what I did on Friday except not sleep, nonetheless make it to a surprisingly good voice lesson, and hang out in the evening withcaptainbutler, who in recent years I've mostly seen at Arisia. We're meeting up later tonight to watch All About Eve (1950), which is one of the unaccountable gaps in my knowledge of classic films. This week, I will start doing things.
Saturday, you have read some about. For as long as I have known him, which is just over eleven years now, Mike has carried around with him a personal sphere of anachronism, generally centered on the 1930's-to-'40's; therefore it does not really surprise me that he lives in a boarding house, nor that my room had a gas fire.1 His cat, however, is as timeless as most cats are, and it's not her fault that a previous owner named her PussPuss. Taxonomically, she must be a calico, but in practice she's mostly a deep brushy fox-rust with soft patches of pure black on her face and a few bits of white thrown in as if for afterthoughts; her eyes are the kind of gold that verges on alcoholic, one of them darker-flecked. I had been warned she was skittish. Mike said he'd never seen her take to anyone as quickly as to me. I came back to my room and turned the fire up and finished reading Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire, the next-to-last of the books I'd brought with me from Boston. Jane Gardam's God on the Rocks (1978) and Philip Kemp's Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick had gotten me through Minneapolis, Tony Kushner's Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays and Bryher's Visa for Avalon to Vancouver. I dozed some, but not as much as I would have liked: I was stuck next to a textbook trio of ugly Americans on the international flight, which was sort of existentially depressing as well as loud. I slept, on Pacific Standard Time, surprisingly well.
Sunday was an illustration in the hazards of visiting clergy: somebody died, so there went the afternoon and Mike's day off. We still had time for lunch at the market on Granville Island before he had to meet with the family; I ate a Cornish pasty with my feet up on some gull-covered rocks, looking out the boats on False Creek and the mountains behind the Granville Street Bridge. It had rained gustily the night I got in from Boston, but three out of the five days I was in town were beautiful: about as brisk and damp as Boston in November, but the difference in latitude made all the light feel later in the year. Huge masses of white and shell-colored clouds built up over the sea. There was a busker singing "Wild Mountain Thyme." At the synagogue, Mike did the intake while I camped out in an armchair and read the first half of Sholem Aleichem's Blonzhende shtern2 (1911); and while it really was unnecessary, I understand why he apologized to me for the trip so far, because after dinner we went to a Kristallnacht memorial. I should somewhere have the program, although it may have disappeared into a backpack or a book. There was a scholarly lecture by a Dr. Reva Adler, an introduction by the mayor of Vancouver, and Mike sang. Afterward we stayed up talking. That's one of the reasons I do not regret this trip.
Monday, it was decided the most efficient thing would be for me to accompany Mike to his various appointments before the funeral; and since this got me an introduction to his voice teacher and a morning spent at a used book store, I have no complaints. Thanks to the Ambleside Book Barn, I spent the rest of the trip (and some of the last few days) reading Anna Massey's Telling Some Tales (2006), Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map (2002), and Byron Rogers' The Last Englishman: A Biography of J.L. Carr (2003), which the proprietor personally handed me after I'd asked him about Carr's non-A Month in the Country novels. I cannot find a link for the Savary Island Pie Company, but a slice of their salmon pie was delicious and kind of astonishingly English, Pacific Northwest notwithstanding. The funeral was in Richmond. The highway ran straight through salt marshes where I saw three blue herons by the side of the road and towering reefs of cloud wherever there weren't mountains. I wish I had been allowed to bury my grandmother when she died, not merely throw in a handful of dirt I can barely remember. We got back and met Mike's girlfriend for dinner at the excellent India Bistro. This may have been the day on which I realized I had taken photographs of barely anyone or anything at all.3
Tuesday, we had been planning to do the Grouse Grind, but it was raining in a mild, unmalicious, immovable kind of way, so instead we spent the morning at the Museum of Anthropology—which had renovated since I was last there, something like ten years ago—and the afternoon walking the six miles of Stanley Park's seawall in rain-light and dark scatterings of eider ducks and cargo ships out in the bay. There were starfish on the nearer rocks, urchin-purple and scalding red under the rain-scarred water. On the recommendation of Mike's girlfriend, we returned home by way of MacLeod's Books, where she said scenes from The Neverending Story had been filmed. I don't know about that, but I left with Volume III of the Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov (trans. Paul Schmidt, 1998) and a hardcover reprint of H.D.'s Palimpsest (1926). There was a first edition of Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), but not that I had fifty dollars for. I wish I could remember the name of the video store Mike took me to after his haftorah class,4 because it had things like a wall of Czech film. We ended up renting Arnaud Desplechin's Rois et reine (2004), which had been on the syllabus of the class I TA'd at Yale where I got to lecture on Atanarjuat and the Iliad.
And on Wednesday, in the endlessly opening kind of light that belongs to the year as it falls away, we got up and drove to Whistler Mountain and hiked a trail that led above the snowline, through thousand-year-old cedars. I don't write a lot about forests, or about mountains. They are landscapes that make me hungry, the same as the sea. Especially old forests, full of moss and lichen and the cold smell of bark; especially forests in autumn or winter, the Ice Age forests that I imagined in seventh grade from The Clan of the Cave Bear or from Robert Holdstock in college. I had a little of them when my brothers' godparents lived in Colorado, when I visited
schreibergasse and G in New Hampshire this summer. Here were trees my height across, some fallen and rotting into faces, some still doing Etemenanki. Snow everywhere, ice and overgrown. I do not know for whom there was a cache of small cairns beside the trail, although one of them was a lot more like a herm. We had to leave before it got dark, but it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had that week. That far north and near the sea, I think, is a region of the world I could love.Thursday was travel. Mike's landlady, who is Mennonite from Paraguay, sent me off with as many McVitie's fruit bars as she thought I could eat and a bar of milk chocolate only slightly smaller than Lichtenstein. Mostly on the flight back I read Russian futurism. I've kind of been in a state of crash ever since, with time out for reading Thomas the Tank Engine to a five-year-old. I'm really not built for Eastern Standard Time.
1. The most striking thing is that it's not even self-reinforcing. He gets given flat caps and tweed jackets by people who barely know him. I mean, he owns modern clothes: T-shirts, sweatshirts; I think he's got windbreaker pants on in the photographs I took on Whistler Mountain. One of his congregants still donated him a Greek fisherman's cap on Wednesday.
2. The title is conventionally rendered as Wandering Stars, but a closer version would be Stars Astray—think farblondzhet, lost, off course, all mixed up. It's a tragicomic novel of the Yiddish theater and two lovers who never quite find one another and I think it might have been much more romantic and sentimental had it been written a decade earlier with Stempenyu (1888) and Yossele solovey (1889); instead, it's deeply skeptical of the world in which its characters move and even of its protagonists, ostensibly the innamorati at the heart of this zhargon-commedia. I liked it very much.
3. It's been established that I have the instinct for writing about whatever happens to me, but I am completely missing the one that makes you pull out a camera phone for the Rally to Restore Sanity or a nice angle of the sky. Unless I remind myself specifically to take pictures of a trip, it doesn't happen. Sometimes I remind myself specifically and it still doesn't happen. There may be photographs from this trip forthcoming, assuming it's still possible to develop the film on which they were taken.
4. They thought I was a ringer. It is true that I don't know haftorah trope, but since I learned Torah trope once in thirteen days, it was a fair guess.
I can't remember what I did on Friday except not sleep, nonetheless make it to a surprisingly good voice lesson, and hang out in the evening with
captainbutler, who in recent years I've mostly seen at Arisia. We're meeting up later tonight to watch All About Eve (1950), which is one of the unaccountable gaps in my knowledge of classic films. This week, I will start doing things.