SFContario 2

Recounting old battles and savouring past victories is a pleasant way to spend the evening whether with old friends or new acquaintances. The latter have the advantage of never having heard your war stories before and – even better – can’t correct you when you stray into hyperbole. But sharing stories with those who were there and took part has a sweeter flavour.

Indeed, there is a certain pleasure to listen to people swap stories even if it involves something you were no part of. Watching them jogging each other’s memories and sharing credit (or shifting blame) can be a fascinating dance to watch. Last night, I spent the evening at SFContario doing exactly that. It was great fun.

After a day of panelling both as an audience member – the one on First Contact stood out – and a speaker (I skipped my last one, mea culpa) I slipped out to dinner with some of my fellow con attendees and a few friends who happened to be in town. We shared a few drinks and more than a few stories while we dined on unhealthy but delicious pub food. It was great fun – particularly when stories began to riff off each other as old friends crafted a lovely simulacrum of past events from their own particular remembered perspective. Sometimes I was one of the sculptors and sometimes I merely listened and observed. New friends – or in this case, more recent ones – had their own stories to tell and, if they were at first reluctant to speak out, it didn’t take long before conversations began to dance around the table.

A lot of times it was not a matter of telling shared events but rather recounting parallel stories. That reminds me of… or I had a similar experience/epiphany/fright when… And that’s how friendships are built and maintained, one story at a time.

Later, I went back to SFContario and hung around the Swill party. Swill, as I understand it (I’d had a few glasses by then), was a fanzine that had its origins some 35 years ago among a group of – shall I call them loveable rascals – who took great pleasure in writing outrageous commentaries and satires on the Powers That Be in organized SF fandom of the day. The details don’t matter. What was fun was listening to the stories of various scandalous adventures they had perpetrated and the upset they had caused. Recently, Swill was revived – though whether from nostalgia or a renewed sense of outrage, I was never quite sure.

Eventually, the others gathered there trotted out their own stories of youthful or not so youthful rebellion, lessons learned, mistakes made, victories – however small – won. It reminded me of all the great convention parties I’ve gone to over the years – places where common culture and loves are shared and explored and new initiates welcomed into the great long conversation SF fandom has been holding – sometimes jovially, sometimes with bitter rancour – for nearly a hundred years.

And that’s ten minutes.

 

Hemingway

I have this photo over my writing desk. It is Ernest Hemingway with his son, Greg. Both came to hard difficult ends. Though that’s not why I keep it on the wall. That is more complex.

Of course, the simple answer is that I am a big fan of Hemingway, an aficionado, if you like. I’ve read all his novels and short stories, even his few poems and plays. I’ve also consumed a half-dozen biographies – all of which provide a different perspective on his life. I’ve used examples from Hemingway when I’m teaching as well. You can learn a lot about writing by seeing what he did and didn’t do.

The more complex answer is that, knowing all that, I can still learn things by looking at that picture. Some days it is nothing more than a man sharing time with his son. Neither of them knows what lies over the horizon. For the moment, they are at peace. Perhaps they’ve been hunting – but if so they were unsuccessful; there is no evidence of game on the bridge where they sit. Perhaps the lake has been empty all day as it is at this moment. Perhaps none of that matters because game is not what they’ve been hunting for.

The boy in any case is unshod, not ready for a hike through the brush, not ready for anything. His father is always ready – but maybe not ready for this moment. He doesn’t touch his son, even though the boy is sleeping bedside him. Rather he looks away, trying to see, perhaps, what he is meant to do. Is he thinking about his own father, a man by all accounts distant from his children, content to leave them in the hands of their mother while he goes about his business as a doctor? Is he thinking about the way his father died and about how he threw the gun into the water?

But for now it doesn’t matter. Father and son are together and even though they are not speaking – perhaps have barely spoken all day other than rough instructions or admonitions – they are teaching each other about their respective roles. They are teaching each other about manhood – ironic given the secrets of the older man and the fate of the younger.

I keep the photo above my desk for all these reasons; as a reminder of what words can do even when they are unspoken; as a lesson about men and their sons; as way of kick-starting my own writing when the words seem distant and unexpressed.

I keep it there because I like it. I like the simple lines and shades of grey. I like the expressions in the faces and the bodies, the ease they have in the present. Because clearly they do not know the future, none of us do. They only have the weight of memory and the present pleasure. And I am reminded that this is enough.

And that’s ten minutes.

University

My nieces and nephew are starting University this week – hard to believe that the triplets have all left home to start the next stage of their life journey. It must be quite a shock for my brother and his wife to go from a full house to an empty nest in just a few days. As I look at their posts and pictures of orientation and dorm rooms on Facebook, I can’t help but think of my own first weeks at Mount Alison University, forty three years ago.

Life was easy for me back then – maybe easier than it ever was again. I was on full scholarship – with enough money to cover tuition, room and board, books with a few bucks left over to buy a stereo and some records. Okay, the latter were bought with my savings from work but at least I had savings. That first year I worked in a pizza place for 8-10 hours a week, so I was pretty much on easy street.

Orientation was perhaps a bit more robust than it is today. We went through most of a week of lectures on how to live at university combined with relentless hazing from the sophomores. It was never too harsh, though occasionally frightening. It culminated with a walk through a swamp chest-deep in mud, before we came out dirty and tired but in possession of our freshman tam. It was the last year for the swamp – it wasn’t exactly hygienic and a few people got some nasty infections. I still remember the joy I felt when we started chasing the sophomores who had tormented us, covered in muck and with bottles of ketchup and honey in our hands. I particularly liked having football players run away from me.

That first week or two was quite an experience. I’d never really been away from home for more than a week or so and I’d never had a roommate – other than when I shared a bunk bed with my brother when we were kids. Randy and I got along great – people thought we’d known each other for years when in fact we met for the first time in our shared dorm room. It was a friendship I kept for the rest of his life (he died much too early from cancer). There were lots of other friends made too – and a few sort of enemies.

At least I wasn’t trying to learn the dating scene. My girlfriend from high school was there as well and we married at the end of our second year. It didn’t last but it seemed right at the time.

But that didn’t stop me from learning how to party – those first few weeks were a wash of alcohol (and bad aftermaths) and eventually grass. I learned how to handle it though. At the end of the year, I retained my scholarships with an 80+ average while half of my first year friends were flunking out. But that’s a story for another day.

‘Cause that’s ten minutes.

Statues

Conservatives seem to love statues. And why not? Statues can be about anything you like – they don’t have to reflect real history; they can support any myth you want to attach to them. And statues can’t talk back. And they are sturdy. Build a statue and you can point to it and say: See I accomplished something. Even while there are so many real jobs that would help real people that aren’t being done.

In America, conservatives particularly like religious statues placed in or near government buildings. It doesn’t have to be Christian – a lot of Americans want to put of Jewish statues too. You know, plaques with the Ten Commandments on them. Too bad about that pesky separation of church and state in the Constitution.

In Canada, our current government really gets hard for stone. Or bronze. They plop up statues at a moment’s notice, either building them themselves or supporting some crackpot millionaire with a chip on his shoulder. Most of those guys have more dollars than sense and hopefully, after the election, they will simply fade away.

The statue that bugs me most is the one near my office on Parliament Hill. It commemorates the War of 1812, which the Conservatives claim was the founding event of Canada. Never mind that almost all of the soldiers were British and the few locals that got involved were either Aboriginal or some farm boys dragooned into the combat. No-one really took it seriously – a few building were burned and, at the end, the borders remained pretty much where they were. Both sides claim to have won so I guess that makes it a draw. A bit like kissing your sister.

This final skirmish of the American War of Independence was hardly a founding moment for Canada – that came in the uprisings of 1837 when McKenzie and Papineau demanded responsible government. Present day conservatives are hardly likely to want to commemorate that cause. Or remember when the people rose up against the conservatives of the day.

I hate the statue to 1812. To tell you the truth I have to resist spitting on it every time I walk by. Unlike real war memorials which celebrate the sacrifice of soldiers and remember the horrors of war, these soldiers seem almost gleeful as they fire their cannons toward the Chateau Laurier (named for a former Liberal Prime Minister) and point their muskets toward the actual War Memorial across the street. Pretty ironic in light of the events of last October.

This is a celebration of war, nothing more and nothing less. It is about what you would expect from a Prime Minister and Cabinet who like to prance around in semi-military clothing, pretending to be one of our men and women in the forces. It’s no wonder so many real veterans oppose them.

And that’s ten minutes.

Comic Books

When I’m nostalgic, I think of comic books. Not graphic novels, not movies or Marvel Universes but comic books – those slightly dusty smelling 32 or 48 page magazines with glossy covers and newsprint interiors. Those are the things of my childhood.

I can’t remember the first books that caught my attention but by the time I was 10 or 11, I was accumulating comics of every kind. I was as likely to be reading cowboy stories from Dell, a Gold Key Tarzan adventure, a Classic adaptation of Robinson Crusoe as I was to be following the heroics of Superman or the web-crawling angst of Spiderman.

I collected them and traded them with friends. My earliest intense friendships were built around a common love of comic books. Age didn’t come in to it. My best friend was three years older than me – a huge gulf when you are 12 years old.

Being a comic book collector in a small town in Nova Scotia was not an easy thing. Only a couple of stores carried them – usually in a single rack in the corner of the store. You soon learned which store was most reliable in getting the books you wanted – even knowing when the books would appear on the shelf. I was such a regular at one store that the owner set aside my books for me so I wouldn’t miss an issue.

I was an enterprising lad. I mowed lawns, shovelled snow, sold greeting cards door to door, delivered newspapers and eventually, when I was fourteen got my first part-time job at the town library – a natural haven for a book worm like me. All that effort driven by the love of comics.

But local purchases weren’t enough. They kept you caught up on your favorite stories – I was buying 25 comics a month – but what about back issues? Some I got through trades – giving up lesser favored lines for back issues of those that obsessed me. To fill in the gaps, I started hitchhiking 40 kilometers to Moncton to find piles of used comics in the United Book Store. I was 14 by then and it was a good thing my mother didn’t know – I suspect my comic book days might have been numbered if she had.

Still, I found plenty of treasures: the first appearance of Thor in a Marvel comic and a #3 issue of Spiderman. I planned my weekends around trips to used book stores and even garage or estate sales in the hopes of finding a rare gem. I even once bought the entire collection of a boy who was moving away – just to get a couple of issues I coveted. The rest made great trade material.

I joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society – complete with membership card and special subscription rates. For a while I had comics come by mail direct from New York but didn’t like the way they were folded – creating a permanent crease up the middle. I’d lie awake at night hoping to hear Cousin Brucie on WABC give one of his occasional insights into my favorite heroes.

By the time I went to University, I had 2000 comics; raids from fellow students soon reduced it to 1500 and I kept them locked up after that (and spent a fortune replacing the missing issues). Then came my first divorce and my collection went away like a puff of smoke. And I’ve never felt the same about them since.

But that’s ten minutes.

Fleeting Fame

A few years ago I reconnected with an old college friend. She and I had been close for a couple of years – close enough that if we both hadn’t been involved with someone else, more might have developed. But it didn’t and we both went our separate ways. Her marriage lasted (and resulted in three children); mine did not. But, by the time we corresponded again, I had some plays produced, stories sold, a novel published. As I said to her, we both had created something to be remembered for. After I said that, I never heard from her again.

A lot of artists think of their work as somehow equivalent to children; those with actual children might disagree. Children of artists might disagree even more strenuously, especially if their parents seem to care more about their art than they do their children. Some famous figures in the art world were reputed to be terrible parents – Hemingway, Picasso, Ezra Pound – though you might want to check with their kids before making a final judgement.

Perhaps artists recognize that while your children might remember you more intensely and with greater passion, your art will spread your memory more broadly. After all everyone has some notion of Shakespeare’s plays but who can say anything about his descendants?

Still, I realize that the comparison must be odious to some people – and rightly so. Especially since fame is so fleeting – at least for most of the famous.

Take Luise Rainer. Who? The first actor to win multiple Oscars, she was also the first to win two in a row. And until she died last year, she was the longest living winner of the award. It’s not that I’m a big fan of her films; I happened to come across her name when I was looking for something else. Her fame – or lack of it – is now well documented digitally. But there is no assurance that digital fame will last. Some significant parts of our digital history have already been lost – to think the rest will last a hundred years is unlikely.

Fame in the present day is no guarantee of fame tomorrow. We recall Shakespeare and Marlowe but after that only a few people can name five of their play-writing contemporaries – I certainly can’t. We recall Dickens but Bulwer-Lytton, a far more successful contemporary, is only remembered for a bad writing competition. Bob Dylan reached fame when he went electric; how many of his folk contemporaries are still part of popular culture?

Fame, in any case, is a mixed blessing – for society at least if not for the individual. Lately, we have seen how the famous do more damage than good – entire books have been written about the distortions they create in our social, political and scientific understandings. Whether it is Paltrow’s bad diet advice or Jim Carrey’s ill-informed rantings about vaccinations, their pronouncements may be wrong but, sadly, are more likely to be believed than the scientific evidence.

Perhaps history can’t move fast enough to obliterate them from the public consciousness.

But that’s ten minutes.

Stuff

Things tend to accumulate until you can hardly navigate around them. You don’t have to be a hoarder to experience the feeling of being enclosed and trapped by your things. Che Guevara used to steal from Francis Bacon and call children hostages to society but your things can be just as confining.

As I sit here, I am surrounded by stuff I probably don’t need but which I am loathe to give up. The list begins with books but hardly stops there. Periodically, like all bibliophiles, I go through the stacks looking for those few volumes I can afford to give away. Too often they have special meaning. Not yet read but I am sure I will someday, for example. Who am I kidding? If I haven’t read it in ten years why do I think I will read it in the next ten or, if I have that long, the next twenty.

Yet there they sit, staring at me with their sad puppy dog eyes (especially the military SF) daring me to put them on the curb.

But books are only the beginning. Like every man who ever lived I have dozens of t-shirts that no longer fit but which represent some special stage in my life. A passage or a trip or a sporting event. To part with them would be like carving out a square inch of memory-containing brain tissue. By the way, if your wives or girlfriends bug you about your t-shirts, just ask them about their shoes.

It is everywhere; I have things stored in boxes which I don’t even know about. I have stuff shoved in cupboards, not because I have any use for it but kept it only because it was a present from someone – though often I can’t quite remember who.

I have CDs I never play, DVDs I never watch. And besides the t-shirts I have a lot of clothes I never wear. It is like the baggage of my life taken material form. Hell, I even have baggage I keep in the storage room in case I ever need that impossibly large suitcase for some sort of endless world journey to places that don’t have washing facilities.

Stuff begins to weigh you down. I sometimes discuss with my wife the idea of living somewhere else for four months or six. But inevitably it comes down to the question of where we will put all our stuff. Will it survive in storage? Could we trust renters (if we simply abandon our condo to others) not to destroy or steal it? And what about the condo itself? Nothing sometimes but a gilded cage to hold our stuff. And us.

Che Guevera also used to say property is theft. And he may have been right. But not quite in the way he meant it. Sometimes property steals your freedom – locks you in an ever growing prison of possession. Maybe it’s time for the revolution! Time to abandon all things!

But first I have to see if there is another book I can part with.

And that’s ten minutes.

Transitions

For most of us memory is episodic, that is, we don’t remember every single moment of every day, unreeling in our mind like an endless, mostly boring, movie. We remember the highpoints: the outstanding events that marked us in one way or another. If we try really hard we can call up more obscure moments or they may be triggered by an event in the present day. Still there are long gaps or a multitude of shorter ones.

It is these gaps that give our life continuity. We are all master storytellers (probably why so many of us want to be writers) and we fill in those gaps to create a smooth narrative of our life. Certainly we all go through changes, start off doing one thing and then do something else. We have loves that last and others that come and go. But often we assume that there is a clear path from one to the next.

In fact, I suspect, there are vast chasms on life’s path. There are moments when we are one thing and then a few seconds later are literally someone or something else. The conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus is not a singular and unusual event; it the normal transitions we go through. Years ago, there was a book called Passages that talked about the various stages one might pass through but it was never clear to me how we get from one path to the next. Now, it seems it is a leap of faith that allows us to make the transition.

In my own life, I’ve made many transitions. As the time they seemed dramatic – as when I went from being focused on being a chemist to being absorbed with all things sociological and political. At other times they seemed traumatic as I went from loving one person to loving another. In retrospect I could see a clear path that lead to the change, reasons for making the big move. But what if they were not reasons but rationalizations, post facto explanations that made the inexplicable normal?

How much control do we really have over these fundamental shifts in our lives? Some claim to be able to plan each step – they have a goal and they calculate the best path to achieve it and then move forward. But if this is true why do so many people reach the end of the line to discover that the goals they set are not exactly the goals they reached? How many people find themselves not only wondering how they got here but where the hell here is?

Of course, if you live mostly in the present, you can avoid all of this existential angst. You can simply accept that you are where you are meant to be. The past is gone and the future unknowable so maybe it is better simply to be happy with what you have. Certainly keep looking to the misty horizon and do the things that you think will take you into the future. But understand that it is all a dream. When the storm arrives all you can do is be prepared and let it take you to the next harbour.

And that’s ten minutes.

Cheating Death

Everyone wants to cheat death. So far as we know, no one ever has. Of course, immortals would want to keep that secret but it would be tough to do so, especially in the age of so much surveillance, so much concern over identity. People have tried to disappear but it turns out it’s harder to do than you might think. Staying disappeared is even harder.

So barring immortality (and frankly I’ve never been able to discern the psychological difference between craving life after death from craving it in the form of uploaded consciousness), the options open to us are more limited. If personal immortality is out of the question, at least for now, what else could provide its surrogate?

Undying fame is one option. People have been trying to get themselves in the history books ever since there were history books. Some succeeded despite best efforts to keep them out. Others — and who can say how many — have failed utterly and are unremembered. That will likely be the fate of most of us. I got that straight from Ozymandias so it’s pretty much gold.

Still, some succeed. Most people remember Caesar if only from the salad or drink that bear his name. And lots of people have a vague idea of who Shakespeare was even if who he was exactly is pretty vague. That could change of course as more and more schools stop making him a regular part of the curriculum.

Fame is fleeting as they say — many who were famous in life became forgotten soon after their death or had their memories twisted into something they wouldn’t recognize. They say that most of us have an entirely wrong impression of Nietzsche thanks to the efforts of his sister. And poor Bulwer Lytton — one of most famous English writers of the early nineteenth century is now mostly remembered for “It was a dark and stormy night”.

Family is another way to cheat death — but kids and grandkids can be so unreliable. And the extended power of families begins to become very uncomfortable when we live in a democracy. I, personally, am not looking forward to another Clinton vs. Bush presidential campaign if it comes to that in 2016. Though most families are less public than that — preferring to extend their power for generations through the accumulation of wealth and power behind the scenes. But even that is no guarantee of forever. As the last King of Egypt is reputed to say: someday there will only be 5 Kings — that of England, and of Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spades. If Kings have gone the way of all flesh, what chance do any of us mere mortals having of still having an impact after we’re dead — or even after next year?

But that’s ten minutes.

Newfoundland Sorrow

I’ve been to Newfoundland (really just St. John’s) four times — twice during my art education phase and once on Senate business, studying the oil industry. But it is the first visit — the one a week after my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer — that colours them all.

It was December 1995. Lynne had discovered a lump while showering on the day of her thesis defence. She said nothing to me — or to anyone else — but went to the defence, kicked ass and came home with her Master’s degree. It was Friday, so we had a party. On Monday, she went to her doctor and that night told me that she was scheduled for a biopsy the following Monday.

Given her age (41) and the rapidity of the lump’s growth (it hadn’t been there three months before during her exam), the biopsy was done in the morning and the results were delivered that afternoon. Stage 2 but aggressive.

They offered to do the surgery that week but we had a trip planned to Newfoundland to visit Lynne’s closest friends before going on to Nova Scotia to spend Christmas with my family. We had put a lot of resources — time and money — into the trip and she refused to give it up. The doctors agreed that there was no harm waiting a few weeks (it actually was optimal because it would then occur in the middle of her menstrual cycle — maximizing chances of success) so a few days later we were off to St. John’s.

Lynne was determined that the trip would be fun and focussed on our friends who were in Newfoundland teaching at Memorial on a term assignment. They weren’t all that happy and she didn’t want to make them unhappier.

So we didn’t say a word for four days. We visited museums and shops, climbed Signal Hill in the fog, ate and drank and listened to music at their house — a beautiful old place on the waterfront — or at the many bars and restaurants scattered through downtown.

Winter often comes late to St. John’s and so it was that year. It was mild — I doubt if it ever is warm there, at least not based on subsequent trips — with a couple of beautiful clear days, the sun shining like gems on the harbour, plus some real low overcast days with the banks of fog moving in and out with the tide. It was, in a word, perfectly beautiful. It was Newfoundland.

But sun or cloud it was all coloured with a deep shade of blue and the weight of impending doom.

On our final night there we broke the news. There was wine mixed with the tears but as the night progressed there was also love and laughter. That colours my memory, too.

Lynne was lucky. Her cancer was effectively treated and she is still well to this day, though we are no longer together. But I can never think of Newfoundland without thinking of that first visit and her toughness and tenderness. And the sorrow — not for her, but for those who weren’t so lucky.

And that’s ten minutes.