back to school

I'll take a quick pause from my morning research to write a post.

Labor Day has just passed, and today is the universal day of "back to school"--a stronger feeling of New Year for me and many others than the holiday on 1 January. For all those years growing up life changed on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and one literally entered a "new year" of one's education.

It's a perfect back-to-school day here: a slight chill in the air, a faint mistiness in the morning air, and the green trees tinged with yellow and orange, the first blush of autumn.

Am I "back to school"? I suppose I never left it. Maybe I'm like the young Ebenezer Scrooge, the solitary boy left behind in the classroom, working while his mates were off home for the holiday. But I'm not here because I lack alternatives. I like what I'm doing, and feel vaguely anxious and off-course if I'm forced away from my solitary research. I'm motivated, because at some level I'm doing this not for myself but for others. Yes, solitary as I am, I'm working for others.

a snowy morning

Awoke again just before 4:00 with a restless mind. When the alarm went off at 5:30 Kimmie sprang up to peer out the blinds at the window.

"What's happening?" I said.

"There's about five inches of snow!"

She was excited. We both like heavy snows, for their beauty, unusualness, and the quiet and disruption they bring to the busy city.

"Guess I'd better get out there and shovel," I said.

Dressing hastily in "work" sweatpants and T-shirt, and throwing on an old fleece and windbreaker, I fetched a plastic snow shovel from the storage-room off our building's common garage and went out into the dark. Yes: all was blanketed in thick, pristine snow, which continued to fall in wet flakes. Someone had trudged up the sidewalk maybe a half hour earlier: their footprints were mostly filled in. But otherwise it was pristine. Starting at our own front porch, I bent to the task of shoveling.

Being the only able-bodied man in the four townhouses that front our stretch of road, I take on the responsibility of shoveling snow out front. The rumble of my plastic blade along the concrete walks was loud in the silent morning. I worked fast, wanting to get it all done before people started tramping it down. Shove, lift, toss; shove, lift, toss.

A woman came walking down St. Georges Avenue, turning on to Keith toward the bus stop in front of our house. She was an older woman, rather tall, dressed in a dark coat and hat.

"We'll be glad when this winter's over," she said quietly as she passed me.

"I like it," I said, heaving another load of snow to one side.

"You do?"

She sounded almost interested rather than surprised, but didn't break stride in her progress to the bus stop. Soon she was joined by a gray-bearded man holding a tall cup of coffee. They quietly said good morning to each other.

I cut a channel through the snow to the street corner, then shoveled off my neighbors' individual walks. Only a couple of vehicles trawled up through the snowy streets, making muffled, muttering sounds while I worked. Otherwise, the only sound was the rhythmic scrape of my plastic shovel. The snow shone in the impersonal apricot-colored light of the streetlamps. The bus arrived, pulling up carefully, and the woman and man boarded. The bus spun its wheels awhile before it was able to pull away.

Panting, and feeling a bit sore in the lower back, I trudged up my cleared steps and rested the shovel on my porch. It was 6:20--time to come in an make the coffee.

careers not attempted

Last night Kimmie and I attended a reception at the Vancouver Art Gallery to highlight the work of two local photographers, Stuart McCall and Angela Cameron. Pressing through heavy traffic in the moist, dark warmth of the evening, we found parking up on Hornby Street and made our way to the gallery, situated right at the center of downtown in the old courthouse building.

The reception was tucked away in a small room beyond some service stairs at the southwest corner of the building. There about 30 people sipped wine and nibbled chocolates and cashews, talking and viewing the selection of large prints. I've known Stuart since 1980, when he used to work at the Eatons camera counter with my friend Brad. Not long after that he set up a studio with a couple of partners in Gastown, and has been plying the photographic trade ever since. He's an artist by nature, but his bread-and-butter work is industrial photography: he enjoys photographing hydro dams, coal mines, factories, and the like.

Only one of his photographs last night was truly industrial: a steaming mill in Fort McMurray, Alberta. The others were striking and vivid scenes from around the city, and neighborhoods where he's lived. Kimmie and I both especially liked a shot of his old 'hood in Kits Point in the 1980s: a night shot, with colorful old houses shrouded in snow, standing behind gnarled, black, naked trees.

I talked with a few people there, including Peter, Stuart's former photography partner, who left to become a crime-scene photographer in London. He's spent a bit of time in Los Angeles hobnobbing with Hollywood types, and is also working on a screenplay. Knowing about the success of The Odyssey, he wondered why I hadn't gone down to L.A. to try to launch a career there. For his part, he'd found that he fitted in very easily in the social scene there. But he's extroverted, engaging, and handsome (I'm only engaging and handsome).

It's not that I never considered it. But in my heart of hearts, I didn't have a desire for a Hollywood career. I didn't see myself going down there to hustle projects, or to seek work--any work--on other people's shows. At the least, I would have to have a script in hand that I wanted to shop--a project I really wanted to get made, and was willing to do anything to make that happen. I just wasn't in that situation. As I said a couple of months ago to Michael Chechik, producer of The Odyssey, "I don't want to write shows that I wouldn't want to watch."

Interestingly, my own father faced the choice of "going Hollywood" himself, years ago (probably in the 1970s or 80s). He was already a career TV guy here in Canada, a producer with the CBC. In talking with an agent down there, he found that he could very likely get lots of work directing commercials and TV episodes, and do very well at it. He was tempted. He thought about renting a small apartment there, and commuting from Vancouver. But he realized that developing a career there would likely mean, among other things, entertaining people, which would require a bigger, better place, and spending more and more time there--until it would be his whole life. And he didn't want to live in L.A., or, especially, to bring his family there.

I feel similarly. I know it's not me. I can write scripts--I'm sure I've got more good ones in me--and when I do write them, I'll do what I need to in order to realize them--including shopping them in L.A. But I want to stay on the beam of doing what I really want to do--and what only I can do. It's very hard to explain what I'm doing or why--even to myself. But I do have a feeling that I'm doing what's right for me.

When it comes right down to it, I don't even want a house in Bel Air or a Ferrari. So I should leave those on the table for others.

building mental cathedrals

When I used to work at ICBC head office, I would walk home each afternoon--an uphill trek of about 12 minutes. One of the sights I passed each day was a three-story apartment building under construction: under very slow, slow construction.

I never saw more than two men working at the site at any one time, and often only one (and more often, none). My theory was that the building was being built by one guy, some eccentric who had taken it into his head to build an apartment block almost single-handedly. I wondered at how someone could afford to do such a thing; hadn't he borrowed money to buy the land and materials? Wasn't he shucking out interest payments month after month, with no rent coming in? The site had become notorious in the community, and supposedly the city government had had to push the owner to develop the site, which had sat vacant for months or perhaps years.

Some part of me appreciated the type of eccentricity and do-it-yourself resolve that would get someone to build an apartment block all on his own. I could relate. For the image came to me recently that writing a book is much like building a large structure, like an apartment block, and doing so single-handedly. But it's an invisible structure. And what if the structure were not a three-story walk-up, but a cathedral? Imagine building a cathedral, all on your own, which is invisible until it's finished. I would say that's not a bad image for this project. A mental cathedral, built by one (very) eccentric guy, the very progress of which cannot be noted by others, but only by that self-same guy.

Who would do such a thing?

As far as I know, the eccentric apartment-builder finished his project and it is occupied now. It's a finished, useful dwelling, like any other that was built much more quickly by a team. The patience and vision of that lone do-it-yourselfer paid off. So I've added him to my little group of inspirations and role models.

a cold eye on publishing

A couple of days ago, while checking in on Debra Young's pendrifter blog, I clicked on to a post by novelist Holly Lisle about the destructiveness of the contemporary publishing industry on the career of the writer.

Yes, it sounds bad: how the impersonal, automated methods of big-box bookstores, by programmatically ordering ever-fewer quantities of a writer's books, and distributing them throughout the chain in ways that make little sense, systematically choke off the writer's ability to attract readers and effectively ruin that writer. Holly Lisle is a staunch fan of the independent bookstore, where human beings who are knowledgeable about books and who like them choose to promote writers based on a variety of factors, thus allowing writers to build audiences and make a living at their craft.

I'm sure all of this is true. Certainly, big-box stores are impersonal and filled with a lot of stuff that doesn't interest me. The main bookstore here on the North Shore is the big-box Chapters-Indigo on Marine Drive, with another one opening (or just opened) at Park Royal in West Van. There are many titles in these stores, but still I usually can't find what I'm looking for--in fact, almost never can I find what I'm looking for, if it's something specific.

Of course, when ordering and stocking decisions are made by computer programs, these will probably be inferior to decisions made by knowledgeable people. Also, big-box bookstores are inferior even to other big-box stores, like Wal-Mart, which is able to keep prices low. In general, at Chapters-Indigo I pay full price for books (with a discount that I get for buying an annual membership card--a loyalty program that could just as well be instituted by an independent). And their growing monopsony power over publishers is terrible, in that they can drive down prices, as Wal-Mart does (while not passing these on to the consumer, for the most part), and delay even longer than smaller bookstores in settling their accounts. To me, this is probably the single worst attribute of the chain stores, and the most damaging to publishing as a whole.

But I'm wondering whether the big-box stores are really as bad as they are made out to be. In one sense, the big question is how much retail shelf-space there is out there for books. For no matter who orders the books, or how many copies are ordered, there is only so much retail space in which to put the product. The more copies of your book there are on the shelves, the fewer copies of mine there are. It is a zero-sum game.

This problem has long been a big factor in grocery retailing. There are far more providers of food and related products than there are supermarket shelves to put all that stuff on. The result is a ferocious Darwinian war between suppliers, who have to pay off retailers to stock their stuff, or to put it at eye-level, or to set up end-of-aisle displays. The war for shelf-space created the old phenomenon (not practiced so intently now, I think) of cereal boxes' being much larger than their contents (remember the old package advisory, "this box is packed by weight, not volume; some settling of contents may have occurred"?). The reason for this "settling" was to take up more shelf space, presenting a larger billboard to shoppers and depriving competitors of space. A freaking rainforest-ecosystem in there.

As far as I know, nothing so intense happens in the war for bookstore shelf-space. But space is still limited, and in a certain sense it's just a matter of taste as to what fills it.

So, yes, writers' careers are ruined. Holly Lisle makes the point that no one cares about midlist writers because there are always plenty more where they came from. I've heard the "turtle eggs" analogy used. In fact, writers have always got the short end of the stick, right back to ancient Rome, when the "publishing industry" first started. In those days, entrepreneurs would make copies of a writer's book and sell them, and often make a lot of money. There being no concept of copyright, the writer would get nothing.

Back then, of course, writers were mainly gentlemen of leisure, who had no need or expectation of revenue from their writing.

The bigger problem, in my view, is that there is too much product out there. As with movies and TV, the industry has built itself on the pipeline model, where product--as much of it as possible--has to be moving through the pipe in order for the business to keep going. Thus, there are too many books of too-low quality. The pipelines are all operating at as high pressure as they can, spewing product into the limited space of bookstore shelves. This might keep publishers afloat, but are readers' interests being served?

I think not. The great mass of books, especially fiction, are junk food. It's churned out quickly and disposed of. If you're Doritos you don't want to be edged out by Cheez Pleezrs, but in the big picture, does it really matter?

up on the roof

Heavy rains have returned. The GVRD has issued a "boil water" advisory: all tap-water, even for brushing teeth and washing dishes, should be boiled for one minute before use. Indeed, the water in the toilets is turbid; it's visibly cloudy even as it comes out of the tap.

Outside the rain has let up somewhat. I'm supposed to be joining my neighbor Ken in an expedition up to our roof to look for the source of a leak in one of the townhouses. It's not a thought I relish, especially after watching real-life trauma shows recently on TV, which mainly seem to have focused on falls. Two of them have been roof-falls from heights of about 20 feet. The injuries aren't nice, and always bring on fervent resolves--by the survivors--that they won't head up a roof again.

But as president of my strata corporation, it seems to be one of the tasks that falls to me. Falls.

Creative writing is still on hold while I work on my commercial assignment. There's always reading around the edges, though--something to do over coffee and tea each day. The only book that I'm currently reading that relates to my own novel is Persian Fire by Tom Holland. Even though he's dealing with events 450 years before my period, I find it valuable--anything to help get insight into the ancient mindset. Holland's cynical, gossipy writing style is fun and engaging, even if it arouses a bit of skepticism about his understanding of ancient characters, at least for this reader. His account of the battle of Marathon, though, which I just read last night, was stirring and effective.

Other reading I'm doing: Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks, a new account of exactly how the Iraq War got screwed up. It's another library book, so I've been reading it down here at the PC. It's also only a "14-day book", so I've got to take it back tomorrow (about 8 people have holds on it at the library), even though I've only made it 85 pages in so far.

It's later. I'm just back in from my roof inspection with Ken. We used two ladders, a long and a short, to gain access first to a resident's balcony, and second from there to the roof. Rain was falling lightly, and we took great care in climbing from the ladder over a short stretch of slippery cedar shingles to get to the flat asphalt-and-gravel inner part. There was a pool of accumulated rainwater around one roof-drain, where someone--maybe the roofer we sent up a couple of weeks ago to look into this problem--had created little dikes of pea-gravel to pen the water. Strange, we thought.

I kicked the gravel back flat and Ken took some digital photos. From the roof we could see the city skyline across the water: a blurry dark blue with bright pinkish-white sky beyond. The light was already fading from the day, clouds clinging and swirling like dark gunsmoke to the mountain above us.

There was no obvious point of entry for the water. My best guess is that there may be a rupture of some kind in the drainpipe itself below the level of the roof. We'll have to get someone in.

Now: tea and reading!

fresh concrete

The weather has turned cooler again, and dry after the torrents of the weekend. I wore sweatpants, sweatshirt, and gloves on my run--and earplugs to keep my ears warm. I felt heavy and sluggish, still carrying my lunch of navy-bean soup, pita, and an apple.

After I'd walked off the run I chatted with the city crew at the intersection nearby. They'd spent the last two days tearing up ground and pouring concrete for a new crosswalk on the east side of Keith Road. The city has decided to turn it into a four-way stop with zebra crosswalks on three sides.

"Can you believe it?" said the Italian guy in his orange safety vest. "A four-way stop with zebras. They're already backed up at Keith and Lonsdale. What's it gonna be like here?"

"They've got a stop sign there already," I said, pointing at the southbound side of St. Georges, which runs downhill to the west of our building. "People usually don't stop there anyway."

"Yeah, people in a rush. Like this idiot--" He indicated a red coupe stopped northbound on St. Georges behind two other cars stopped at the upper stop sign across the boulevard that divides Keith Road. "People can't even turn left around him."

With a loud burst of smoky acceleration, the coupe was up and across the north lane of Keith road, speeding up St. Georges. The worker shook his head.

"Where's a cop when you need him?"

I looked over their handiwork.

"When will this concrete set?" I said.

"We should be back taking the stuff down tomorrow afternoon," said a younger guy who was picking up tools. "You'll be able to walk on it tomorrow."

"I'm thinking about tonight," I said. "Kids might write graffiti in it if it's still soft enough."

"Oh!" said the young guy. "Well, we put up the tape around it. I mean, what can you do?"

"We should put some poly over it," said the Italian guy.

"Naw," said the young guy doubtfully. "It's not going to rain."

"No--because the kids are too lazy to lift the poly," said the Italian guy.

But the idea died out quickly. I looked over the smooth wet concrete--maybe the last time it will ever appear that way--and came inside.

thoughts on a warm autumn day

Southwestern B.C. is recovering from flooding after torrential rainfall over the past few days, but now, here, on steeply sloping and therefore mostly floodproof North Vancouver, it is sunny and balmy, with great cumulus clouds tumbling slowly and silently over one another in a pristine blue sky. I'm just in from a short run, which I did in shorts. I could even have left my sweatshirt at home, it was so warm.

It all looks different, now that I'm reading The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock. Since it's a library book, I've been reading it here at the PC in the early morning over coffee, typing notes while I read. (It's not the most enjoyable way to read a book, but it is efficient if one is to take notes that are to make their way to the computer eventually.)

This morning I read chapter 3, "The Life History of Gaia", in which Lovelock sketches the history of Earth as a self-regulating system, which, he believes, it became shortly after the first life appeared on it over 3 billion years ago. Since then, Gaia has, like an organism, maintained itself in a state of dynamic equilibrium, with its constituent life-forms metabolizing and evolving in such a way that the overall environment is conducive to continued life. When there are perturbations to that equilibrium, Gaia has feedback mechanisms that push conditions back to life-optimal.

Lovelock says that textbooks are incorrect when they claim that Earth simply happens to be at a distance from the sun that makes it hospitable for life. There was a time, he says, about 2 billion years ago, when Gaia was in a "Goldilocks" period and no special mechanisms were required either to heat or cool the planet, but at the time life first appeared the sun was about 25% cooler than it is now. Since then it has grown steadily hotter, and will continue to do so until it finally explodes many billions of years from now.

He believes that Gaia has more than one equilibrium temperature. In this it is like the camel, which has two. By day, the camel maintains a body temperature of about 40 degrees Celsius, close to the ambient temperature of the desert air. But at night, the camel's temperature regulator is reset to about 34 degrees, so it can function without having to burn so much energy.

Depending on conditions in space and the life-forms on it, Gaia may have several of these equilibrium points. But Lovelock says that for the past several million years, as the sun has grown so hot, Gaia has shown a preference for ice ages, when the temperature was kept cooler, and the total amount of life may have been greater, due to the much larger land area around the tropics (exposed by dropped sea-level) and the much greater productivity of the cooler oceans (the great majority of open ocean is desert of life).

He believes that the long warming trend since the last ice age 12,000 years ago is a sign of Gaia's cooling mechanisms' being stretched beyond their capacity. Add to this our flaming-off of all the hydrocarbons stored beneath the surface of the Earth, creating a heating blanket around us, and we have the conditions for all-but-inevitable environmental catastrophe. Lovelock thinks it is probably already too late to stop this. We may be in the early stage of a sudden global heating such as has not been experienced since the onset of the Eocene epoch 55 million years ago, when temperatures shot up by 5 degrees Celsius in the tropics and 8 degrees elsewhere, turning Earth into a desert planet. The event was marked by mass extinctions.

The event can be sudden, in geological terms. Lovelock observes that all the heat-control mechanisms that we know of are in positive-feedback mode toward increasing temperature: shrinking ice-caps, shrinking forest cover, increasing greenhouse gases. The rate of heating will speed up until the next equilibrium point is reached (I'm assuming there is one--haven't finished the book!).

Will humanity survive? Sure. An adaptable species. But how many humans will that be? And will there be any memory of the world civilization we now take for granted? Or are we living in our own legend, like citizens in the last days of Atlantis?

days of the dead

Just in from a short run. Crisp and gray out: the sky a luminous gray. I wear earplugs to prevent earache from the cold air, and gloves, because my knuckles get chapped in the cold dry air. Exploded pumpkin-shells lay on the roads here and there amid the rusty-brown leaf-litter.

When I was walking off my run an RCMP SUV pulled up, stopping the traffic behind it, and the passenger cop asked me something. I approached, tugging my right earplug out, tilting my head to indicate I hadn't heard.

"Have you see a druh kid?"

"Pardon?" I said. "A drugged kid?"

"A drunk kid," said the cop. He was a South Asian man with a bored, slightly irritable expression. He spoke quietly, unemphatically. "A red jacket, walking around?"

I shook my head. "No. I haven't."

They pulled away.

I came inside and headed down here to write this post.

I got three books at the library yesterday. One was The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a novel in a genre that is an old favorite of mine: the postapocalyptic survival tale. I started reading it with my afternoon tea.

I have actually bought a McCarthy novel before: Blood Meridian. I recall exactly when. I was in Vermont in January-February 1993 at the Buddhist center called Karme Choling for a one-month meditation retreat. It was the free day halfway through the program, and many of us went into White River Junction in the freezing cold. After browsing some time at a bookstore there, I decided to buy. Having read a very favorable review of McCarthy's book All the Pretty Horses, I plumped for a copy of Blood Meridian.

I never started it until I returned from my retreat. I couldn't get into it. I found McCarthy's prose very distancing, the characters unsympathetic, and the action violent and gory. It was not my cup of tea.

Now though, with my mind turning toward future-oriented projects, even if not necessarily postapocalyptic in the strict sense, I was intrigued to find out what was out there.

It's a smallish book, with a plain black cover. I found the familiar McCarthy style: spare, distant, with very little punctuation, even commas--just periods. No quotation marks around the dialogue--that type of thing. I find that such techniques distract me and make me unpleasantly conscious of the fact that I'm reading. There is a sense of watching a writer perform, rather than being involved in a story.

The story, such as it is so far (to page 22), is of a father and son, survivors in an otherwise charred and unpopulated American wasteland, where roads are crumbling and everything is still coated in ash. They push a shopping-cart loaded with their few possessions, headed south in search of warmth.

As yet, nothing has happened. That is, nothing that advances the story. The little paragraph-long scenes are just snippets of exposition: coming across an abandoned gas station, the man reminiscing about a day spent rowing on a lake with his uncle long ago. With his austere style, McCarthy is painting a picture of his postapocalyptic world--but that's all.

We'll see. If nothing happens, I'll have to bail. What do I know? I'm only a reader, not a literary star.

lunch in town

The sun is back, streaming at a 45-degree angle, barring my blue office wall through the venetian blinds.

I had lunch downtown with my sisters--all three of them: Mara, Lisa, Shannon. We seldom get together as a group (the last time was about three years ago, at Lisa's instigation as always, to have a photo taken to give to Dad), but I really enjoy it.

We met at the Steamworks Brewing Company in Gastown, right by Granville Waterfront Station where I get off the SeaBus. It's a busy, popular place with dark wooden tables and bars in a remodeled 19th-century building. The little table was barely large enough to hold our four large plates. Without intending it, the three women all ordered the same salad--some kind of Indian-influenced thing that came with papadum. I had the special chicken and blue cheese on a baguette.

"I'm not ready to be one of the girls yet," I said.

The talk first of all was of Mara's elder daughter Chella, who had just found an apartment downtown after weeks of searching--apparently a real find in a newish building at Howe and Davie, a ninth-floor suite with full utilities, hardwood floors, and granite counters. Not bad for a 22-year-old and her roommate. Interestingly, Mara's younger daughter Clare had also found digs in Vancouver just days before--a suite in a house in Kitsilano, shared with three friends.

Shannon, the youngest, also has two daughters, aged three and one, and I got to talking about one of my favorite subjects, astrology, answering questions about their charts (I have these loaded on my Palm). It was all very animated, with much back and forth--a lot of fun. I'm an Aquarius, Mara and Shannon are both Libras, and Lisa's a Leo. But I was getting into the intricacies of reading the Moon sign and rising sign, and how these reflect our emotional nature and our coping skills respectively. Shannon seemed delighted to hear about how her girls reflect their astrological signs: her moody and emotional eldest, Emily, the Cancer; and her impulsive go-getter one-year-old Chloe, the Aries (right on the cusp of Pisces, so also compassionate and caring, tenderly tucking in her little plush toys).

Lisa had a meeting to get to back at Environment Canada, and Shannon had to return to her mites, whom she'd left with a neighbor and her daughters. Lisa had a busboy take a photo of the four of us, and we headed into the cool sunshine of October.

Lisa and I walked together as far as Waterfront Station, where we were surprised to see a chase: a short, rumpled, long-bearded homunculus of a man sprinted across Cordova Street with first one, then two more, security guards in hot pursuit. The thief (I'm assuming it was a thief) was running as though for his life on his short little legs. The lead guard, a short, stocky man himself, in black, was also running as fast as he could, with adrenaline-charged energy. The thief dashed in front of cars on Seymour Street, right across the flow of traffic. I thought that would give the guards pause, but not so--they dashed right after him. The fleeing man then cut onto Cordova, again plunging right out into traffic, and out there, at the yellow center-line, the little black-clad guy caught him and hauled him down. The other guards ran up to pin him to the pavement while cars crept around them. I admired the lead guard, because the grizzled little thief had done his best to escape. It was a raw physical contest, and he lost fair and square.

Lisa and I embraced, and I went in to catch the SeaBus back to North Van.

running, reading, and that's about it

The rain stopped later this afternoon, so I decided to act against my inclination and go for a run. They say that if you're feeling at all depressed, physical exercise is a good idea. It's also a good idea if your body is accumulating unwanted mass. So out I staggered on the wet sidewalks and streets. The highlight is when I leave Keith Road two blocks east and turn down St. Davids Avenue. For a short half-block there is a lovely vista of Vancouver across the water. Today the city was in repose over the quiet water, screened by mist as though by fine talc floating in the air. The clouds had been ripped to long streamers and slips in the pristine blue sky. Unaccustomed sunlight flared off the water, a brilliant disk, too bright to look at.

I just came down quickly to key something in here, since I am letting the blog drop lately. But it is pushing on for 5:00, and I don't want to cut into my reading time (I already am). A feeling of endless, aimless research. I feel driven to study, but I never arrive anywhere. There is a throughput of books, but what do I know?

Well, I'll just have to trust. Yesterday afternoon I read Comparative Politics, Future: Tense by Gwynne Dyer (a favorite writer of mine; Kimmie gave me the book for my birthday), Communitarianism and Individualism, and Microbiology the Easy Way. Today I'll probably read from the same books.

Off I go.

reelin' in the years

Awoke at 5:30 and lay in the dark, as ever feeling dissatisfied and not up to the task. Kimmie was awakened repeatedly in the night, she said, by the loud sound of raindrops dripping on a sheet of metal, and another set of drops on plastic. It's probably the strips aluminum soffit tucked under our back deck, which is no longer waterproof since it was resurfaced by a friend four years ago. Water drips through to what is below.

"I'll see what I can do about it," I said.

It has rained for 23 straight days in Vancouver, according to the radio. The song that came on as I sat up in bed was "Reelin' in the Years" from Steely Dan's original Can't Buy a Thrill album in 1972. The title means more to me now, but I always liked the song, and it took me back to a specific memory: early 1973, when I was 14, and had just finished delivering The Province newspapers one Saturday--and had collapsed on my bed just after sunrise. Sunlight streamed pinkly through the homemade red-corduroy curtain of my basement bedroom, and Elliott Randall's carefree guitar solo seemed to express perfectly the feeling of wellbeing and freedom of having finished humping an extra-heavy paper sack up and down the streets of Upper Lonsdale. This morning I dawdled as I put on my T-shirt and sweatpants and socks and glasses and wristwatch, listening.

Then: downstairs to make coffee, open up the PC, and get to work. My new strategy is to skip research notes first thing and get right to writing. The idea is to increase my productivity. It makes it harder to get out of bed, since the instinctive fear and resistance keep me stuck to the mattress longer (what I have sometimes called the Bed of Procrastes), but eventually I must get up, if only to make sure Kimmie gets a cup of coffee. It's actually a good way to start: a bit like jumping into the pool instead of creeping down the stairs, getting your skin wet one centimeter at a time. It's a shock--but you're swimming, and you feel alive.

I didn't hit my stride first thing, since I still was underpowered, knowledgewise. I found myself wanting to name which particular Judean fortress my characters would be using, which got me hunting for what and where the fortresses were at that time. I pulled the book Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans from my bottom shelf, checked the index, flipped to the pages describing the geography of Judea, recognized that I hadn't yet keyed that material into my research documents, so took a detour to see to that. It did list fortresses in Judea, but when I spun to my desk (behind me when I'm facing my computer, which sits on a decommissioned kitchen table), where Aharoni and Avi-Yonah's The Macmillan Bible Atlas rested open, I flipped a couple of pages and found a perfect map of the fortresses of that period. It was almost right in front of me! My first impulse was the best: Hyrcania, overlooking the desolate wilderness east of Jerusalem, just before the rocky hills drop 4,000 feet to the Dead Sea.

As I fussed with this and other details of my scene (how many legions were with Caesar when he left Egypt?), I bogged down and wound up producing only 2 pages (almost 3). For me, this is how it is.

singlehanded construction

Heavyish rain pours down on this dark but warm day. Kimmie and I both felt recovered enough from our colds to take a walk out in it, and even lug our liquor purchases (3 large bottles of wine, 1 bottle vodka, 1 bottle vermouth, 6 bottles beer) home on our backs. Whew. We've changed out of our wet jeans and into lounging attire: sweatpants etc.

Kimmie has spent much of the day baking: mainly something to do with chocolate, and lots of it. The Kitchen Aid that we bought a couple of years ago has been whirring continually.

As for me, I nosed ahead with notes for chapter 20. My inquiries took me back to the character Hillel, now called Hillel the Great, and the different Jewish theologies of that period. Locating the beliefs of my characters is long, slow work. Hillel is now a legendary figure, often leaned on as one of the immediate precursors of rabbinic Judaism, which did not really exist as such until after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. He is now most famous for his so-called negative formulation of the Golden Rule: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go, study."

The last directive--"go, study"--was a key instruction of Hillel's; he believed that an ignorant man could not be truly devout. By the time of his death he was hailed as a second Ezra, the scribe famous for seeking new glue to hold the shattered nation of Israel together after the first destruction of its temple and its deportation to Babylonia: universal adherence to the Mosaic Law. Scribe was a job-title of the Hellenistic world generally: scribes were the bureaucrats in Eastern monarchies responsible for record-keeping, including the keeping and interpretation of laws. In the Jewish context, the scribe was a kind of sacred lawyer: a man learned in the Law and its interpretation. With the destruction of the first temple in 586 BC, the priests had lost their raison d'être and those proficient in the Law rose in prominence. When the temple was rebuilt in 517 BC the priests would recover their function in maintaining its cult, but the scribes would continue to grow in importance as expertise in the Law would become a full-time occupation in its own right. The priests and the scribes would form the main pools from which would arise the parties known respectively as the Sadducees and Pharisees.

Hillel was a Pharisee. But the name Pharisee also covered a wide range of attitudes and beliefs, all held (more or less) together by a common acceptance of what's known as the Oral Law, the spiritual equivalent of what we would call the common law: the law of precedent, as established by judgments already made on contentious issues. There was a vast tradition of such judgments, often competing or even contradictory judgments. Everything depended on the authority of those making the judgments. Hillel introduced a systematic methodology for reasoning from scripture in order to rationalize the procedure for arriving at new judgments, and increase the likelihood of consensus. His interpretive system was derived from the techniques of literary analysis already in use in the wider Hellenistic world.

I perused the material I've keyed on Hillel--he has his own document in the Characters folder. Hm, the last entry I made here was in March 2005.

When Kimmie and I walked home from the liquor store down on Esplanade (all uphill), we trudged up the lane between 4th and 5th streets. Off that lane, facing Lonsdale, is a three-story apartment building, coated in pink stucco. It has been under construction for at least the last eight years, and is still unoccupied. While I was still working at ICBC I would walk past it every day, and observe the slow progress. There was never more than a couple of guys working on it at any one time, and often only one guy. Our theory was that the lot owner had decided, for some reason, to build the whole thing single-handedly. Indeed, that's what it looks like. What must it be like for him? I think I know. You finally finish installing the balcony doors on the third floor, then look down at the piles of gravel and dirt you had dumped on the lot 17 months ago: "Ah yes--time to start the landscaping..."

rainwashed thoughts

This morning back to the research notes: A History of Technology, Alexander the Great, A History of Warfare, and Peoples, Nations and Cultures.

Kimmie was off into the heavy but warmer morning rain, and I got back to chapter 19. Still building the scaffolding of my scene: imagining my world. Questions, suggestions. Moving toward the scene conflict: what do my characters want? Always a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Plus I had to create a couple more characters to have on hand.

Morning became afternoon. There was lunch to eat, errands to do. I drove out to Pemberton Avenue where Waterland has its new storefront. A Closed sign hung in the window. Ivan, the clerk, opened the door when he saw me approach.

"Waiting for inspector," he said. "Should be running by Saturday."

He invited me to play chess (he had a board set up on the counter even though the place was closed). I felt tempted, but declined. Plus I was illegally parked. I filled one jug at Save-On Foods at Pemberton Plaza, then negotiated the heavy Marine Drive traffic to Cap Mall, where I picked up a bottle of Bell's scotch.

As I walked back out to the parking lot I was struck by the beauty of the sky, a network of pristine blue beyond dark, tattered islands of cloud. The few leaves clinging to denuded little alders sparkled in the low sunlight. There was the massive shadow of cottonwood trees, cathedral-high, by McKay Creek to the right. It is autumn, but the world was still fresh and vibrant, scrubbed clean by wind and rain. My mind felt the same way, clear and open after a period of agitation.

Life keeps moving to its end. What will you do?

Create in joy.

a rainy Saturday

The dying days of Kimmie's vacation. They are rainy, gray, and now cold. Kimmie loves the weather.

We went to IHOP in New West, then walked through the West End of New West, looking at the old houses, sharing the large Knowledge Network umbrella I inherited from Harvey Burt. Our last stop there was Starbucks for a hot chocolate.

Back to Park Royal in West Van, so Kimmie could buy patterns on sale at Fabricland. Even though I spent so much on books yesterday, I went to Coles and wound up buying two: Uriel's Machine by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas (authors of The Hiram Key, a history of the Masons), and The Iraq War by John Keegan, whose History of Warfare I'm enjoying so much right now. (When I saw that Uriel's Machine contains material on the Book of Enoch, an important text underlying my own work, I knew I had to buy it, even though I found The Hiram Key a bit lightweight.)

While Kimmie continued to shop, I sat out in the mall with my prose sketchbook and made this entry:

SAT. 5 NOV 2005 1:55 p.m. PARK ROYAL SOUTH SIDE

Outside the luggage store called Bentley. I'm on a bench by a table set up in the mall for a woman candidate for mayor to meet and greet passersby. A thin blonde woman in a suit, with Remembrance poppy, with a loud false laugh as people tell her things. Women surround the candidate, and a thick-necked, brush-headed young man with his back to me: Down'’s syndrome.

To the left of Bentley: a Bell telephone store; to the right: The Body Shop. A little gray daylight filters down from high windows, beyond the adventure playground nestled below a tangled geometrical strutwork of yellow girders.

A man talks to a group behind me: a woman answers: "It's hard to see the councillors, I think..."

Mega Luggage Sale 60% Off

"...and I said, Great, sure, go ahead!"

The timbre of the man's voice causes his words to be lost; they don'’t carry.

Clusters of people walk by.

Mother-&-teen-daughter, striding quickly.

2 teen girlfriends.

2 middle-aged women, short, one of them Chinese.

Older man stands in front of Bentley, arms folded, waiting. He drifts away.

Young family strolls by: girl in orange T-shirt, husband in green T-shirt; she pushes the luggage-piled stroller while he carries the little daughter.

Chinese couple sits next to me: man grim-mouthed with soft ash-colored hair at the roots, dyed black toward the ends. Now they're gone again.

Now it's a white guy in jeans, maybe 60, with a speckled brush-cut. Simple black shoes, black fleece.

There's the loud forced laugh, somewhere behind me and to my left.

Mr. 60 has risen to meet his wife, a plumper blonde in a big yellow windbreaker.

I'm joined by a short thick-headed Chinese man, rubbing something aromatic into his hands, which he periodically smells.

Through more heavy, rainy, Saturday traffic to Wal-Mart and up to the library to find a movie for tonight. Since none of my holds has come in, I picked another film from slightly farther along Paul's Rom-Com Festival: The Truth About Cats and Dogs.

Now we're home. Time for a fire, and to read some of this pile of books I've bought.

gullets, guts, and genius

A faint brightness behind the overcast, and rain fell sparsely most of today.

Kimmie had a gastroscopy at St. Paul's Hospital downtown. I drove us there early for the noon appointment ("don't be late" the handout commands), and we loitered in the wide corridors of the Providence Building, looking at historical exhibits of the hospital while waiting for the moment to approach the reception desk of the gastrointestinal unit. The humanity passing up and down the yellow halls was as miscellaneous as at an airport: in jeans, scrubs, security-guard uniforms, pajamas; white, Chinese, Filipino, aboriginal; serious, laughing, stoned, anxious. When Kimmie, quiet but brave, was accepted into the GI unit, I was told to return at 1:30.

I walked up Burrard Street and along Robson, passing by the Chapters-Indigo bookstore to seek out a can of Coca-Cola on Granville. I bought it at a little hole-in-the-wall newsstand where a Middle Eastern guy was watching soccer on a laptop on the service counter. I drank the Coke standing by the newspaper boxes at the corner of Granville and Robson, watching buses and police cars shoot by and people stride singly or scurry in groups like quail against the traffic lights, impatient of waiting. An Asian girl tried to hand out free copies of a newspaper; a friendly attractive young man tried to interest people in signing up as monthly donors to Médecins Sans Frontieres.

Coke finished, I entered the Chapters-Indigo store and headed upstairs to peruse the history shelves. A few titles there really interested me, but I held off since I hadn't brought the coupons I'd got when I renewed my loyalty card. I trailed listlessly through some fiction shelves on the top floor, mainly through the science-fiction shelves, thinking I might glimpse something at least with some imagination. No. It's all underworked, I thought.

As 1:30 approached I wound up at the poetry and criticism shelves, and saw some books by Harold Bloom. I picked up the tome titled Genius, a list of 100 literary geniuses and why Bloom chose them. The book opens with his comments on genius and what it is. I flipped. Hm. I like Harold Bloom, was very inspired by The Western Canon, which I got in 1996. What the hell, I thought--I'll get this.

I was attracted by the thought of being reconnected with why I--or anyone--reads in the first place. Here are some of Bloom's words from the introduction:

Literary genius, difficult to define, depends upon deep reading for its verification. The reader learns to identify with what she or he feels is a greatness that can be joined to the self, without violating the self's integrity.... Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom, which I believe to be the true use of literature for life.

I have written before of how I personally was stirred and summoned to a higher life by reading Dostoevsky and Joyce (both included in Bloom's 100). I used to think, years or decades ago, that I had (or might have) genius in this literary sense (I knew I had it in the mundane, IQ sense). Now I think not--although I'm not sure. I might. How hotly does the fire of creative desire burn within me?

I find the idea of genius fascinating, disturbing in some ways. It is isolating, and yet, through created works, can unite people and uplift them.

I bought the book and hurried back to St. Paul's to join Kimmie in the GI unit, where she lay quietly under a flannelette sheet, small and folded up, asleep, her face red. I approached and touched her. Slowly she came awake, opening her eyes a crack.

"Is it done yet?" she said weakly.

"Oh I think so," I said. "I've come back at the time they told me."

"Oh yeah...I'm in a different room."

Kimmie had been filled with Valium before the scope was sent down her gullet. The nurses were caring and affectionate with Kimmie and the other patients in the ward.

"Would you like something, darling?" they would say. Or: "He's a cutie-patootie."

In time Kimmie could sit up and eat a small muffin and a slice of cheese. I helped her out to a Blenz coffee bar across Burrard, then back to the car and home. We drove across the Lions Gate Bridge into a giant rainbow.

strolling through chapter 19 and my neighborhood

A somewhat troubled night. I rose at around 3:20 to fetch a whisky and drink it in the dark. Drifted off again at around 5:00. When I revived at about 7:00, Kimmie was getting up. She made the coffee this morning, and even brought me a mug down here in my office. Lovely! Now that's living.

I opened up chapter 19 and kept tinkering with the early part. No two chapters are alike in how they develop, how they're written. This one is challenging me to understand the real nature of Menahem's story. As I devise events to happen to him, I also need to discover the significance of these events, and how he interprets them relative to his life and beliefs. It's surprisingly hard. And I have to weave the results into the existing draft: adding, replacing, revising.

But we're in vacation mode, so I'm going easy on myself in terms of demanding productivity. If I get anything done, I treat it as a bonus. Feels good! I've got to page 17 of the chapter this way.

Kimmie and I went out into the morning sun, picking up Halloween materials at Michael's Crafts (fake black curly hair; colored color-flow icing), dropping the car at T. F. & T. Automotive for servicing, and walking up past the construction on Esplanade to Moodyville's Cafe for breakfast. Sun streamed in the large picture-window facing Lonsdale: the window was streaky, and someone had scratched crude graffiti letters into the glass. My pancakes were excellent.

Next: we walked up Chesterfield, passing more construction in the building-blitz of Lower Lonsdale, pausing at the bunkerlike decommissioned government liquor store on 2nd Street to look at an art mural on the blank cinderblock of its west wall: a copy of Dejeuner sur L'Herbe by Manet. The nude model had been clothed in a crude wetsuit of orange with black stripes. The wall-sized image had been created on a plastic material and then pasted to the building. I explained what I knew of the original painting to Kimmie, and we headed up to the North Vancouver Archives, which Kimmie would like to visit as part of her vacation itinerary. But small schoolchildren were being crammed into the place, so we skipped it and continued uphill to look at the progress of demolition of the old apartments at 6th and Chesterfield. Apparently built in the 1950s, with fireplaces and a central outdoor swimming pool, these two buildings finished their days as subsidized housing. Now the south building has been leveled to splinters. Workmen were going through the north building, ripping the aluminum frames out of the windows. The wrought-iron railings are already gone.

Then: home. Kimmie had icing witches to pipe and so on. Next up: my niece Chella is due to stop by to pick one of Kimmie's homemade Halloween costumes to wear to a party on Saturday. There are now quite a few to choose from: angel, harem girl, vampire, cowgirl, Playboy bunny, and a few more--all sexed-up. What will Chella choose?

Teatime. Off to read more of A History of Warfare.

notes, illness, and bears

This morning, the slow, halting process of launching chapter 19. I opened the notes document and also a number of research documents: documents with titles like "Rome - 48 BC", "Rome - Jews", "Rome - Tiber Island", and "Festivals". I started reading through the material I've keyed, occasionally copying and pasting a germane section into my chapter-notes document.

Meanwhile, Kimmie took today off work, feeling unwell. She has lower-abdominal pain, and it hurts for her to walk. I made her schedule the next available appointment with her new doctor (tomorrow morning), and saw that she had an extra-warm blanket, heating pad, tea, and so on in bed where she has stayed most of the day. A chance for her to read the next Laurell Hamilton vampire book, and a number of magazines with Halloween baking and decorating ideas.

I scooted out to my mother's house on an errand, listening to the car radio, enjoying the brilliance of the sunshine and its contrast with the ever-darker blue of the shadows. It's bear country out there: a bear has been consistently raiding her garbage container and even tore into the outdoor freezer, robbing it of all its contents.

The bear issue here in North Vancouver is a growing one, with passionate feelings, most vocally expressed by those saying that the bears are a wonderful part of our local culture, and we should respect them because they were here first. My own view is that British Columbia is not deficient in wilderness habitat; we are a few people sprinkled on a vast wild landscape. The idea that bears are or should be part of our urban environment, the way crows or squirrels are, is to me clearly absurd. Local bears used to be wary of humans--but no more. I predict that the public tolerance for bear activity (that is, a ban on shooting them) will undergo a sea-change when the second or third child is mauled. As of now, only the odd dog has got it. The healthiest thing for everyone--bears included--is for them to start being afraid of us again.