My friend Kyle wrote a piece for the Osgoode Law School newspaper Obiter Dicta last week, talking about the benefits of returning to practice law in St John’s. It was an entertaining piece, and while I didn’t (nor have I ever) respected the bad jokes Kyle threw in his article, I do respect his position. He always states it well, and there’s a particular realism to his patriotism that I think is at the centre of why I can tolerate it.
I find Newfoundland patriotism slightly distasteful and a little deluded. Visiting a couple of weeks ago, my mother joked about a popular documentary that examined what an economic powerhouse Newfoundland could have been if we had maintained national independence in the 1930s. The contrast case was an everlasting boom that would never run into a money problem ever again: Iceland. This is the kind of delusion that annoys me about contemporary Newfoundland patriotism.
But Kyle’s piece centred on aspects of life in St John’s that don’t have the outsized ambition that some of the more naive patriots in the old country have displayed. The lifestyle is relaxed; the people are friendly; the rent is cheap; in the particular case of lawyers, law firms compete to attract students, instead of more frequently the other way around. A lawyer working in St John’s can be more of a community practitioner, instead of a faceless corporate shill. I know most people in law school actually want to be corporate shills. But Kyle is that most rare of law students: he’s actually a very nice person.
This is actually a more personal post on what I found when I returned to St John’s this time. For the first time, it was not because of a special event. It wasn’t Xmas, which I spent in Hamilton for the first time this year. When I went to St John’s this summer, it was for my friends’ wedding, which dominated my time there. This was just midterm break and a relatively cheap direct flight from Toronto. I would have to make my own fun.
I actually found a city that was starting to become distasteful. Ugly box stores were dominating the architecture of the old-growth suburb where I grew up. A very sketchily arranged Burger King was slated to be built within twenty feet of my mother’s condominium complex, ruining the atmosphere with its terrible smell and constant traffic. Hava Java, the legendary coffeeshop that was the centrepiece of the city’s hipster, art, and music communities, was leaving its classic location, forced out by a new building owner who wanted to install office space in the building. He had already forced St John’s’ only gay bar to close the previous Xmas. Some of my friends were doing well, and some of them were stuck in ruts. I hated to see it all.
So I returned to Hamilton, a cheap Ontario steeltown with a bad reputation and an endemic recession, feeling optimistic about where I lived, and much more hopeful for my future outside St John’s than I am for the city itself. My friend Elsa made this movie about it a little while ago, and it reminds me of a city that I’m not sure ever existed.
Showing posts with label Newfoundland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newfoundland. Show all posts
Monday, March 7, 2011
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wisdom Only Comes With the Falling of Dusk
I can now consider Lisa Moore to have officially made it, because she’s been reviewed in the New York Times. I first met her when I interviewed her for The Muse, either just before or just after she became writer-in-residence at Memorial University. I can’t quite remember the exact chronology. She filled the job incredibly well, becoming a popular fixture on campus and deeply integrated with the literature student community. I had given up on writing of my own when she was writer-in-residence, so I wasn’t really an active member of that scene. If I could go back now that I self-identify very differently, I don’t really know what would change. But this post isn’t about other possible worlds.
Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.
The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.
Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.
The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?
(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)
Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.
The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.
Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.
The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?
(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Patches of Scenery in the Past and Future at Once
In the weeks since I’ve gotten back to quite a busy semester, I haven’t really blogged anything. I decided to drop the gossipy post I wrote about my time in St John’s. Suffice to say that my friends who are doing well are doing rather well, and the rest should really move to the opposite side of the country. Or at least Montreal. Cabs in St John’s are now impossible to flag down now that they’re the regular targets of rich coke-addled morons visiting back from Fort MacMurray. The downtown is marvellously beautiful as always, only slightly marred by the charred gap in the joined buildings on Water street from the last fire.
However, the best part of my month so far has been my week in Cuenca. I don’t count having to stay the night in Quito airport or the non-existent internet connection at my hotel among my highlights. But the conference itself offered some wonderful ideas to steal, we had a formal reception with the mayor of the city, and I made some pleasant and intelligent new friends, one of whom has even given me a lead on a job when I finish my degree in 2012.
The heat of the tropics was not particularly hot, hovering around a comfortable low to middle twenties every day. The architecture was beautiful, a blend of buildings constructed over three centuries in Spanish, French/Spanish, French, and occasionally industrial American, styles. The streets were narrow, and mostly one-way, at least in old Cuenca, where I spent all my time. There were churches everywhere, magnificent stone buildings where there were daily masses held, all of which had impressively high audiences. On the way to the formal conference dinner, a couple of other attendees from my hotel wanted to take pictures inside. It was during a service, and I walked behind them for a moment, but had to step outside. The aura of their submission and devotion was too powerful for me, and I began to have trouble breathing.
Being out of breath was especially common in a city eight thousand feet in the Andes. Walking from my hotel to the University of Cuenca, where the conference was being held, I had to cross a small river over a stone bridge that consisted of three stories of stone steps. Walking down the stairway, even though it was crumbling on the edges of some steps, gave a fantastic view of the university and surrounding houses spread out through the valley between enormous green mountains. The university itself was peppered with pictures of Ché, sometimes two stories tall, along official buildings. I felt a strange pride at being in a place where leftist revolution was actually taken seriously, not just a stereotype on the walls of politically ignorant guitarists.
However, the best part of my month so far has been my week in Cuenca. I don’t count having to stay the night in Quito airport or the non-existent internet connection at my hotel among my highlights. But the conference itself offered some wonderful ideas to steal, we had a formal reception with the mayor of the city, and I made some pleasant and intelligent new friends, one of whom has even given me a lead on a job when I finish my degree in 2012.
The heat of the tropics was not particularly hot, hovering around a comfortable low to middle twenties every day. The architecture was beautiful, a blend of buildings constructed over three centuries in Spanish, French/Spanish, French, and occasionally industrial American, styles. The streets were narrow, and mostly one-way, at least in old Cuenca, where I spent all my time. There were churches everywhere, magnificent stone buildings where there were daily masses held, all of which had impressively high audiences. On the way to the formal conference dinner, a couple of other attendees from my hotel wanted to take pictures inside. It was during a service, and I walked behind them for a moment, but had to step outside. The aura of their submission and devotion was too powerful for me, and I began to have trouble breathing.
Being out of breath was especially common in a city eight thousand feet in the Andes. Walking from my hotel to the University of Cuenca, where the conference was being held, I had to cross a small river over a stone bridge that consisted of three stories of stone steps. Walking down the stairway, even though it was crumbling on the edges of some steps, gave a fantastic view of the university and surrounding houses spread out through the valley between enormous green mountains. The university itself was peppered with pictures of Ché, sometimes two stories tall, along official buildings. I felt a strange pride at being in a place where leftist revolution was actually taken seriously, not just a stereotype on the walls of politically ignorant guitarists.
Friday, October 10, 2008
A Profound End to a Pedestrian Day
Today was an oddly productive day, even though I had planned it that way last night when I wrote down my list of the things I had to do. The most important thing was to sleep in by a couple of hours, since I had no class commitments today, and could make up for the six hour nights I had gotten earlier this week. After checking my e-mail, reading my webcomics, and looking through some music and movie reviews, I made myself presentable for the masses and made a lunch that would last until around 8.00pm.
After that, I got the bus into campus to drop off some forms for a professor who was writing a couple of recommendation letters for me to go with my research grant applications. Since that was the only business that I had to do on campus, I left immediately after this, and got the bus back downtown to buy a new book/laptop bag, as my old one was fraying at the edges, handles, zippers, pockets, and pretty much everything else that could fray.
So I went back home, marked a pile of first year papers, did my laundry, read some The Red and The Black in French (which I've been working on for just over a month now), watched My Name Is Earl, read a New Yorker article about the life of Arianna Huffington, then worked on some thesis research. This is where the first piece of profundity comes in.
I'm almost to the end of a book about the central philosopher of my doctoral thesis project, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book's author, Gary Madison, is a former McMaster professor, and I was told that this book is regarded as the stage-setter for Merleau scholarship, which first made me think it would make me very angry. But Madison and I seem to have very similar perspectives on Merleau. I'm glad because having precedent makes it a lot easier to get people to accept my ideas as valid, something I had some pretty serious problems with during my MA. But I'm a bit disappointed too, because it means my work might not be as iconoclastic as I hoped.
Anyway, my work focusses on Merleau's ideas close to the end of his life, and his unfinished second magnum opus, The Visible and The Invisible. There are a lot of ideas similar to Martin Heidegger's late-period work in Merleau's writing in this era, and as I was finishing a section in Madison's book on the concepts of Being and Logos, I wrote a paragraph so good that it might end up in my thesis almost word for word. In one half-page handwritten paragraph, I connected Heidegger's analysis of the Greek concepts logos and physis, Merleau's appropriation of them into his non-reductive realism, which fed my own Gilles Deleuze-inspired analyses of differentiation (physis) and understanding (logos), in the context of my concept of existence as a process that continually constitutes multiplicity.
With that taken care of, I started writing the novel again. My friend Vikki published a facebook photo album last week that included herself and her posse climbing around some of the hills on the edge of St John's, and I thought of a great way to rewrite an early scene I needed to revisit. I originally included a short scene around page 10 where the protagonist, his university girlfriend, and some of their friends, spent Saturday night drinking in a condominium under construction. The changes in the condo building was originally going to show the shifts in time as the narrative jumped around various points in the protagonist's life. But eventually I dropped the condo angle as it never really fit well into the story.
So instead, the same characters are having the same conversation while hiking up Signal Hill in the middle of a Saturday night drinking. And I added a long paragraph that introduces some of the central themes of the book as the protagonist and his girlfriend look out over the city at night. It revolves around the vibrant, self-contradictory, anachronistic, idiosyncratic nature of the city, the conflicts and resentments between urban and rural Newfoundlanders, and the limitations of life in the city, even while it remains so incredibly alive.
Then, reading out this paragraph to myself, I opened my mouth and swallowed a fly.
After that, I got the bus into campus to drop off some forms for a professor who was writing a couple of recommendation letters for me to go with my research grant applications. Since that was the only business that I had to do on campus, I left immediately after this, and got the bus back downtown to buy a new book/laptop bag, as my old one was fraying at the edges, handles, zippers, pockets, and pretty much everything else that could fray.
So I went back home, marked a pile of first year papers, did my laundry, read some The Red and The Black in French (which I've been working on for just over a month now), watched My Name Is Earl, read a New Yorker article about the life of Arianna Huffington, then worked on some thesis research. This is where the first piece of profundity comes in.
I'm almost to the end of a book about the central philosopher of my doctoral thesis project, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book's author, Gary Madison, is a former McMaster professor, and I was told that this book is regarded as the stage-setter for Merleau scholarship, which first made me think it would make me very angry. But Madison and I seem to have very similar perspectives on Merleau. I'm glad because having precedent makes it a lot easier to get people to accept my ideas as valid, something I had some pretty serious problems with during my MA. But I'm a bit disappointed too, because it means my work might not be as iconoclastic as I hoped.
Anyway, my work focusses on Merleau's ideas close to the end of his life, and his unfinished second magnum opus, The Visible and The Invisible. There are a lot of ideas similar to Martin Heidegger's late-period work in Merleau's writing in this era, and as I was finishing a section in Madison's book on the concepts of Being and Logos, I wrote a paragraph so good that it might end up in my thesis almost word for word. In one half-page handwritten paragraph, I connected Heidegger's analysis of the Greek concepts logos and physis, Merleau's appropriation of them into his non-reductive realism, which fed my own Gilles Deleuze-inspired analyses of differentiation (physis) and understanding (logos), in the context of my concept of existence as a process that continually constitutes multiplicity.
With that taken care of, I started writing the novel again. My friend Vikki published a facebook photo album last week that included herself and her posse climbing around some of the hills on the edge of St John's, and I thought of a great way to rewrite an early scene I needed to revisit. I originally included a short scene around page 10 where the protagonist, his university girlfriend, and some of their friends, spent Saturday night drinking in a condominium under construction. The changes in the condo building was originally going to show the shifts in time as the narrative jumped around various points in the protagonist's life. But eventually I dropped the condo angle as it never really fit well into the story.
So instead, the same characters are having the same conversation while hiking up Signal Hill in the middle of a Saturday night drinking. And I added a long paragraph that introduces some of the central themes of the book as the protagonist and his girlfriend look out over the city at night. It revolves around the vibrant, self-contradictory, anachronistic, idiosyncratic nature of the city, the conflicts and resentments between urban and rural Newfoundlanders, and the limitations of life in the city, even while it remains so incredibly alive.
Then, reading out this paragraph to myself, I opened my mouth and swallowed a fly.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
The Sad State of The Awesome Rock in My Hometown
So I discovered the other day though facebook that Stars are playing Club One in St John's this November. The venue is a spacious club that can fit several hundred people comfortably, and the show should be pretty awesome. Club One has become the main venue in St John's that hosts Canadian indie artists who are reasonably mainstream in Canada, but without the appeal in America outside the Pitchfork set to have really hit the big time, and without the appeal to people over 35 to play the larger concert arenas like the city's money-hemorrhaging white elephant, Mile One Stadium.
Two previous acts I saw at Mile One over the year before I left Newfoundland were Metric and Buck 65. None of the city's local rappers are really good enough to open for Buck. The closest the St John's rap scene has no genuine talent that could break beyond generic hip hop stereotypes other than the novelty act Gazeebow Unit.
Anyway, the local rock band opening up for Stars is the same one that opened for Metric: Hey Rosetta. They have quite a fan following in St John's, and probably an equal number of people who find their music treacly, saccharine, and derivative. You can probably tell that I'm in this latter group. Think Coldplay, only much whinier, and they have yet to write a song whose lyrics are not pathetically over-clichéd.
I got to thinking that this is perhaps all that Newfoundland bands will ever be able to accomplish: opening up for the bigger Canadian bands that play here. It's easy to survive as a working band making good quality music when you can play shows at dozens of popular venues within a hour's drive of your home base. Toronto, Montréal, and Halifax are all hubs of this kind. But St John's, despite the dreams of Danny Williams to make the island a global transportation hub, is just not conducive to musical success. The population of the island is small, and St John's is the only city within convenient driving distance of anything that has reasonable venues to play, even just considering bars with stages.
Assorted bits of Mark Bragg, playing the Ship, of course.
Two previous acts I saw at Mile One over the year before I left Newfoundland were Metric and Buck 65. None of the city's local rappers are really good enough to open for Buck. The closest the St John's rap scene has no genuine talent that could break beyond generic hip hop stereotypes other than the novelty act Gazeebow Unit.
Anyway, the local rock band opening up for Stars is the same one that opened for Metric: Hey Rosetta. They have quite a fan following in St John's, and probably an equal number of people who find their music treacly, saccharine, and derivative. You can probably tell that I'm in this latter group. Think Coldplay, only much whinier, and they have yet to write a song whose lyrics are not pathetically over-clichéd.
I got to thinking that this is perhaps all that Newfoundland bands will ever be able to accomplish: opening up for the bigger Canadian bands that play here. It's easy to survive as a working band making good quality music when you can play shows at dozens of popular venues within a hour's drive of your home base. Toronto, Montréal, and Halifax are all hubs of this kind. But St John's, despite the dreams of Danny Williams to make the island a global transportation hub, is just not conducive to musical success. The population of the island is small, and St John's is the only city within convenient driving distance of anything that has reasonable venues to play, even just considering bars with stages.
Assorted bits of Mark Bragg, playing the Ship, of course.
If a band stays in St John's, it won't take long before they just end up playing to the same fairly small group of people over and over again. This happens to Mark Bragg, who always plays to the same crowd of people at the Ship. It happens to the punk bands who always play to the same crowd of people at Distortion. The Satans and the other crust bands hardly ever leave Turner's Tavern anymore. And if they don't leave town, the Gramercy Riffs and their associated acts Texas Chainsaw and The Late Greats are always going to play to the same crowds of people at CBTGs and the Ship. This even though Gramercy is probably the best band in St John's I've heard since the Discounts in their prime in my entire ten years of living in St John's and going to shows there.
The bands in my hometown have the potential to become gigantic in Canada. I'd say Gramercy has the potential for success on the scale of Arcade Fire. When you live in Montréal, Toronto, or Halifax, it's easy to pile into a van and take a day trip to another city to play a show for people who have never heard you before. But when you live in St John's, going on tour on the mainland is a huge event and a huge investment. Most bands can't afford to do it more than once a year. The rest of the time, they work their terrible day jobs, and play to the same hundred or so people every week. Then they'll eventually get tired of this repetitive grind, and wonder why they aren't as successful as the bands they admire, even though they are just as good as these bands. So they'll split up, and play a reunion show in ten years when they're middle class and suburban with a pile of kids, that all their old fans will nostalgically love. And everyone will wonder why they weren't more successful when they were so good. And everyone will love Newfoundland so much that they will never say that it's because they never left Newfoundland, so no one ever heard them outside St John's.
Potatobug was a brilliant old rock band that gained a huge following in St John's in the early 1990s, who had a reunion show at the start of August. They played the type of music that actually could have brought them pretty far in the rock music scene of Canada. But they stayed in Newfoundland. So the best they ever got was a big following in the city and good turnout for their reunion show at Distortion. And bands that stay in Newfoundland as their home base are always going to have this as the apogee of their musical career. That other very awesome St John's band, the Discounts, had a reunion show this summer too that was the climax of their career.
Isolation kills ambition.
•••
Now some awesome news! This link takes you to the first new song to be released from TV on the Radio's upcoming album Dear Science, called "Dancing Choose." Get over the fact that the song title is a really hideous pun, play it, and rock out. The first few comments on the song are fairly negative, and I am slightly hesitant about Tunde Adebimpe rapping instead of singing, as his singing voice is utterly astounding. But I think this song is alright, and bodes well for the album. Maybe not as good as Cookie Mountain, but certainly good quality, I hope.
The bands in my hometown have the potential to become gigantic in Canada. I'd say Gramercy has the potential for success on the scale of Arcade Fire. When you live in Montréal, Toronto, or Halifax, it's easy to pile into a van and take a day trip to another city to play a show for people who have never heard you before. But when you live in St John's, going on tour on the mainland is a huge event and a huge investment. Most bands can't afford to do it more than once a year. The rest of the time, they work their terrible day jobs, and play to the same hundred or so people every week. Then they'll eventually get tired of this repetitive grind, and wonder why they aren't as successful as the bands they admire, even though they are just as good as these bands. So they'll split up, and play a reunion show in ten years when they're middle class and suburban with a pile of kids, that all their old fans will nostalgically love. And everyone will wonder why they weren't more successful when they were so good. And everyone will love Newfoundland so much that they will never say that it's because they never left Newfoundland, so no one ever heard them outside St John's.
Potatobug was a brilliant old rock band that gained a huge following in St John's in the early 1990s, who had a reunion show at the start of August. They played the type of music that actually could have brought them pretty far in the rock music scene of Canada. But they stayed in Newfoundland. So the best they ever got was a big following in the city and good turnout for their reunion show at Distortion. And bands that stay in Newfoundland as their home base are always going to have this as the apogee of their musical career. That other very awesome St John's band, the Discounts, had a reunion show this summer too that was the climax of their career.
Isolation kills ambition.
•••
Now some awesome news! This link takes you to the first new song to be released from TV on the Radio's upcoming album Dear Science, called "Dancing Choose." Get over the fact that the song title is a really hideous pun, play it, and rock out. The first few comments on the song are fairly negative, and I am slightly hesitant about Tunde Adebimpe rapping instead of singing, as his singing voice is utterly astounding. But I think this song is alright, and bodes well for the album. Maybe not as good as Cookie Mountain, but certainly good quality, I hope.
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