Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Home again.
Got home Thursday night and glad to note no traveling for another six days or so (Victoria on the weekend, Ottawa again the 19-21) – after which there will be no trips east for a couple of months because collective bargaining has ground to a halt. The bargaining teams came to a decision this round that rather than continuing to spin our wheels with an unwilling employer, it’s time to go to mediation and get on with it. Since it takes time to schedule such things, I doubt we will be back there until some time late January.
My hard drive crapped out right before I got on the plane to come home Thursday, and while it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, I had most of my life backed up anyhow. I don’t trust machines anymore since this is the 5th catastrophic hardware failure I’ve experienced in my lifetime of owning computers. That’s three motherboards and two hard drives – all due to faulty product, not my handling of the machines. I also once lost all of my data in a bungled disk-encryption attempt (someone else’s doing, not mine). In any case, $200 later I’m adding another 100 gigs to my laptop because I might as well turn this tragedy into a little bonus for me. More disk space! (Oddly, as I was typing this I got a call from MacStation that my laptop is ready for pickup.)
The biggest headache really is having to re-set all my programs and preferences up. Otherwise I’m pretty laid back about the whole affair.
I haven’t been writing too much the last few days, Ottawa being hard on my internal schedule, though I did manage to bang away for several hours on the flight out – a story about a recent suicide in my family (condolences not necessary, I didn’t know him and this is a common end in my family), and the land that this same person once destroyed by contract logging it. Another piece of the writing path I’ve been following lately about my family, their homestead land, and the histories that we invent about ourselves. The piece I submitted to the Geist postcard fiction contest last week was from the same crazy free write I’ve been adding to for the last month or so. All the stories I ever heard as a kid, about this relative or that, with the twists of faulty memory thrown in for good measure. It’s a reinvention rather than a history.
So it’s Saturday and I am glad to be home, a little hungover from drinks at the WISE with union friends last night, but organized for the week. Got errands, exercise and kid-driving (to a birthday party) on the list for today. Tomorrow we are heading down to the Russian hall to see the Sarti play about Bruce Erickson’s life (Brian’s mom is coming over to see it with us). I am feeling all family and organization and work at the moment. Quite good actually, thinking about what comes next.
Another Sandburg poem.
I bought the complete collected works of Carl Sandburg yesterday at a secondhand bookstore in Ottawa – and am sufficiently enamoured of this poem to post it here. It’s a great one for reading outloud. I’m in love with Sandburg at the moment.
Hammers Pounding
Grant had a sledgehammer pounding and pounding and Lee had a sledgehammer pounding and pounding
And the two hammers gnashed their ends against each other and broke holes and splintered and withered
And nobody knew how the war would end and everybody prayed God his hammer would last longer than the other hammer
Because the whole war hung on the big guess of who had the hardest hammer
And in the end one side one the war because it had a harder hammer than the other side
Give us a hard enough hammer, a long enough hammer and we will break any nation
Crush any star you name or smash the sun and the moon into flinders.Carl Sandburg, 1915
Waving hello on another election day.
Just popping in to let you all know I’m fine, but was on the road (in Victoria overnight) at the end of last week and am away again (Ottawa) this week which always cuts into my blogging time. Not that I stop writing, but sporadic wireless access and all-day meetings make me less inclined towards the online journal.
But it would be remiss of me to let this day pass without posting something, however brief, on the fact the polls have opened in the US election and by the end of today (hopefully) we will have a marginally less dangerous world to live in. I say marginally because even though Obama promises to take the troops out of Iraq, all his talk about Afghanistan makes me twitchy. But that aside, universal health care and college tuition assistance (both relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things) are also Obama promises and would, over time, significantly change the face of the United States as shown at recent McCain rallies (broadcast to the world on YouTube). Something needs to be done about that, really. Like an education system that works.
Because Obama is just another candidate in the same old tired capitalist system, I can’t hold out much hope for fundamental change of the variety promised. Though it has been fun to watch McCain sputter on about the “class warfare” launched by the Democrats, and the frothing hordes at the rallies going on about the evils of Marxism are as cute as any white redneck can be – making this a much more amusing and engaging election for me. Particularly when you realize the things feared and criticized (voter enumeration ala ACORN, universal health care, higher taxation levels for the rich, tuition subsidy, gun control etc) are pretty much symbols of Canadian civil society. Somehow it’s tickling to realize that the worst of the US electorate is terrified of living in Canada. Canada! For the love of Pete – it’s a den of socialist thieves out to steal Joe the Plumber’s money!
Now that’s something to fear people. Just stay away, and no one will get hurt. (Please, please stay away!)
Not surprisingly, international polling shows that Obama is the clearly favoured candidate in all of the industrial western democracies with majority approval in Canada, Sweden, Japan, Mexico, the UK, etc. by a fairly wide margin. And no doubt the whole world is watching today to see if the US continues its long march to the far right (economically, socially, politically) despite the clear failings of a deregulated economic system, or if a journey back to the middle is in order. Because as much as we are all “sovereign” nations, the US political/economical current is one that sweeps us all up and forces the same ideology down through the IMF and the World Bank. It seems a truism in Canada, if there is any chance of getting rid of Harper in the next term we must first see Obama elected down south, and see the policies of the far right thoroughly discredited in that arena.
And it’s not like those watching want Obama to do too much except perhaps rein in the attack dogs of capitalism a wee bit so we can be left to govern socially instead of according to simple (ie Republican) economics. Despite the fact that a Democratic victory seems assured, I won’t believe it until it’s true, and even then I won’t be so sure of what it means until a little while in. Which means going back to my regular state, mostly ignoring US politics and cringing a lot. What else can one do?
Subscribing.
I’ve noticed recently I’ve got quite a few new readers here and just wanted to point out that subscribing to this blog is an option. See the link on the right hand side makred Subscribe? Go there, punch in your email address and voila! You will receive an update each time I post (rarely more than once a day), which also serves to remind you that I’m still here and writing. Just wanted to make sure you knew.
Validating identity is motivation enough.
I had forgotten the nitpickiness of writing and how much I enjoy turning phrases over and over until they flow just right. With the blog, it’s all just and whatever I want to say – a minor edit before publishing – but little finessing otherwise. Not so with poems and other pieces. It’s been both obsessive and fun this week, and I’m just grateful that I’ve got friends willing to read things more than once (not to mention that supportive Brian I keep writing about – he gets even more excited than I do about the finished stuff).
It’s weird though, working on all this polished stuff and posting none of it here – after four and a half years of publishing everything except my most private journals in this space. But according to most magazines and journals – even self-publishing on the web is considered “prior publication” – a no-no when submitting work for consideration. Not that I’m there yet, but I suspect with some of these pieces I will be shortly. At the very least I am working towards a body of work for portfolio purposes in the future (should I ever decide to pursue that MFA in Creative Writing) – and it’s important that it appear fresh, even if it has been around for a little while – I don’t need it all google-able back three or four years.
So there are reasons for this withholding – but it does beg the question of why bother with literary magazines and contests and publishers when I could just as easily promote and share my work here. I’m certainly not writing for remuneration, and am not under the illusion that Canadian writers actually make a living this way (a very few do, but most don’t). I don’t aspire to fame through the tiny circles of the lit community – because that would be a very stupid way to go about becoming “known”. And I’m definitely not in need of more to do in my life!
I suppose being published is the validation of identity I can’t get in any other way. That is, I’ve aspired to write since I was five years old, and have written throughout my whole life. I’m sure I’ve expounded here before on the length of time it’s taken to even allow myself the identity I most desired, even as I have been hired to professional writing and leant my words to many causes. A major piece to solidifying that description of myself is of course, external validation – which is partly what I’m working towards now. Certainly it’s not the only motivation to my writing as I sense the ability for real improvement given daily dedication – but it’s a strong one.
It does feel a little though like I’m cheating my most faithful readers by withholding the good stuff after practicing here for so many years – I do hold out hope my blogging will continue to improve as I hone my “literary” stuff. For those of you interested in doing some critiquing, I would be honoured to draw on your reading skills as I continue to improve my practice. And for those of you who aren’t interested, I promise shortly I will at least post here about the material I am working on (for the curious). It may all go nowhere, but I’m hopeful at the moment that there is enough there to build a body of work on and the possibility of publishing somewhere in the future.
Red Cedar 