Hesiod’s Theogony (and The Works and Days) Translated by C.S. Morrissey

Hesiod is a poet whom I have kept close by me from my undergraduate days thirty-some years ago.  I confess, my Greek is little better than Shakespeare’s as described by Jonson, but  my copy of Lattimore’s translation is filled with notes on scraps of paper and in the margins from university seminars and my own reading, and my dear Loeb volume 57 is in a similar state.  And, I can find my way around Liddell & Scott.

When I heard the news that there was a new translation of Hesiod — a Canadian translation, of all things — I was understandably excited.  C.S. Morrissey’s new translation of (part of) Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and (grudgingly) Days from Talon Books is a very pretty thing to look at.  The cover illustration by Daniel Mackie I found very fetching, in a sort of 1969 psychedelic science-fiction cover meets Diego Rivera way.  Perhaps I should have hesitated when I read in the About the Translator bit that Morrissey is a professor who specializes in philosophical theology at a Catholic college and that he has focused on the monotheistic speculations of Hesiod, et.al.  But, a professional cricket commentator is perfectly entitled to write a treatise on carpentry.  And Morrissey’s Translator’s Note is quite encouraging, almost pagan, in its apparent devotion to the Muses and to Hesiod.

As I read Morrissey’s Theogony, however, I began to have some misgivings.  The verse is fairly unobtrusive and fairly formless, perhaps a reflection of the Chaos out of which the Theogony grows, or, more likely, in keeping with modern poetic fashion.  Morrissey’s decision, however, to eschew footnotes or endnotes in favour of sticking parenthetical words or names into the middle (and beginning [and end]) of lines makes for a very distracting read, far more distracting than would footnotes have been.  I remain unsure whether one is meant to read the parenthetical bits as parenthetical bits or as a part of the verse itself. Metrics are, of course, of little help.

But Morrissey does a workmanlike job of rendering the Greek into coloquial English for the most part, which is a positive achievement.  There are some phrases that don’t work or fall flat –Miss Congenitalia didn’t work for me and Morrissey himself acknowledges the laxatives and toilet paper anachronism.  But on the whole Morrissey’s Theogony flows.  The consonance of “He was shepherding sheep on sacred Helicon” is very nice, in fact, as are the archaic repetitions Morrissey retains in the castration scene.

All well and good for a reader with no Greek, but, as I mentioned, I have a little, and that little has given me trouble with certain decisions Morrissey has made, decisions which I think, make this Morrissey’s , not Hesiod’s Theogony.  Perhaps the most obvious is Morrissey’s decision to translate Zeus’ formulaic epithet, which is literally “Father of gods and likewise of men” with the odd phrase “Zeusfather of gods and husbands”. Repeatedly. With slight variation.  Certainly, the Greek word could have the secondary meaning “husband” just as “man” in English can be used in the admonition “Stand by your man”, but why impose the secondary meaning on the reader when the word in English with the same primary meaning has the same secondary meaning?  Please, Mr. Morrissey, allow your readers the liberty to make their own choice.

Another detail which made me uncomfortable was Morrissey’s choice of chapter and section headings.  For example, he titles a description of Zeus and the Muses as “The Holy Family” which, even without knowing the translator’s affiliation, has connotations not wholly appropriate to the religious world of pre-classic Greece.  I couldn’t help but feel that Morrissey was somehow trying to force a link between Hesiod and Psalm 85 or even making the suggestion that the Muses were somehow equivalent to or embodiments of Christ.

But what was perhaps a most obscure but to me most disturbing detail of Morrissey’s translation, even more disturbing than his decision to leave out the last hundred plus lines of the poem without notice of any sort, is the translator’s treatment of Gaia, the divine Earth.  In two particular places Morrissey has treated Her very poorly.  The first is on p. 34 where Morrissey writes:

Previously, these weapons had been locked away
in the vast Earth, inside Tartarus.

These “weapons” are the thunderbolts, etc. which are to be the tools by which Zeus will rule over the other gods and over men.  But Morrissey has done something nasty to the Earth here.  As well as adding “Tartarus” which is not in the text, Morrissey changes the grammar of the passage.  Hesiod does not say that the weapons had been locked away in Gaia; Hesiod says “Gaia [herself] had hidden them”! By changing Gaia from the subject of the sentence to the object of a prepositional phrase, Morrissey has taken away Her agency!  Gaia has gone from being an active participant, in fact, an instigator of the action which gives Zeus his power, to being the passive “vast Earth”, into which Zeus’ weapons have been thrust for safe keeping.

Later on page 58,  Hesiod’s description of Gaia as suggesting, even urging that the gods take Zeus as king is reduced by Morrissey to a parenthetical “(even shrewd Earth agreed)”.  Again Morrissey has reduced the importance of this female character whom Hesiod has made fundamental.

On the same page, Morrissey pumps up Zeus by suggesting that his actions are merely “inspired” by Gaia and Ouranus while Hesiod writes that Gaia and Ouranus suggest or advise the actions.  Active agency is again removed from Gaia (and Ouranus).

What is Morrissey doing here?  Why this effort to inflate Zeus’ importance while trying hard to deflate Gaia?

Coincidentally, just as I was reading Morrissey’s Theogony, Dr. Henry Morgentaler died, and a little piece was published in the Globe and Mail under the byline “C.S. Morrissey”.  In that piece, Morrissey lays out his opinion of Dr. Morgentaler’s legacy and the effect of current (lack of) abortion laws on civil liberties in Canada.  Rather frighteningly, Morrissey gets through this entire piece about abortion and abortion rights without ever once using the word “woman”. Or “women”. Or “Mother.”

Somehow I smell an agenda.  The Theogony is all about the control of fertility. First Ouranos tries to control Gaia’s fertility and fails, and at the end that Morrissey imposes on the poem, Zeus tries to control Metis’ fertility (by swallowing her) and also fails.

Morrissey ends, as I said, by leaving out over a hundred lines of Hesiod’s verse, with no note to the reader that he has done so.  And he ends with the tastles, unHesiodic and sort of meaningless quip that Metis is “the ultimate insider”.

I’ve not yet finished Morrissey’s translation of  The Works (and Days) but I notice he starts right off with another “Zeusfather of gods and husbands”.  Furthermore, Morrissey inserts into the creation of Pandora story near the beginning of The Works and Days the doubly anachronistic phrase “chemical blueprint”.  I find this phrase suspiciously parallel to Morrissey’s use (in his abortion opinion piece) of Pope Francis’ statement that at conception, the zygote “has all the genetic code of a human being”. (So does a bone marrow stem cell or a hair follicle, for that matter, but I’m not here to argue the ethics of bone marrow transplants, eyebrow plucking or even abortion.) Into one piece Morrissey inserts “genetic code” at conception; into the other he inserts “chemical blueprint” at the creation of Pandora, molded of Earth.  Morrissey is trying to get a message across here, and that message is not in Hesiod’s Greek. Disappointing.

C.S. Morrissey’s translation of (part of) Hesiod’s Theogony and The Works and Days is published by Talon Books.

______________________

A quick update now that I’m well into the Pandora section of The Works and Days.  I’ve just read a gratuitously misogynistic fabricated expansion of Hesiod’s explanation of Pandora’s name.  For simplicity, I’ll quote Evelyn-White’s century old Loeb translation of the passage:

Also the Guide, the slayer of Argus, contrived within her lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature at the will of loud thundering Zeus, and the Herald of gods put speech in her.  And he called this woman Pandora, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread.

Okay, Hesiod was no feminist, but look what Morrissey does with  the passage:

But then Hermes, Zeus’ messenger and
the Slayer of Argus the monster, put into her breast
his  cunning character:
wily lies and winning words.
He did this according to the plan of deep-thundering Zeus.
This clever voice that he,
the clever herald of the gods, placed in her,
is the reason why he named this woman
Pandora – the “Gift” for Whom “Anything Goes.”
Also, in her “anything” a god living on Olympus has
was “gifted” by them to us: Pandora
- the “Gift” into Whom “Anything Goes.”
She is why husbands work for food: a pain.

Nice slut-shaming, Professor!

To be honest, I don’t know if I can stomach finishing this “translation”.

On the Occasion of Commander Hadfield’s Return to Earth

I have written elsewhere about my inspiration as a youngster watching Neil Armstrong stepping down onto the Moon, the same event that put another young Canadian boy on the road to command of the ISS.  I have written elsewhere about the writings of Carl Sagan leading me to the great Irish mystic poet Yeats.  I have written elsewhere about how obvious it seems to me that science and art are fundamentally the same thing, that both inspire and move us, the both change us and our world and, perhaps most importantly, both science and art, and all the wonder they stir in us, are accessible to all of us.  I have always known this to be true.  I have always seen supporting Science and supporting the Arts as obvious obligations of individuals and society. But I am very aware that many friends and acquaintances have never been able to see through those lenses.

Over the last five months I’ve often thought of Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s Stardance in which art comes to a space station as dance. And, of course, I’ve thought of the paintings of astronaut Alan Bean and of cosmonaut Alexey Leonov.  While Bean and Leonov’s art is exquisite and inspiring, they painted after they came home. And the Robinson’s so wonderfully imagine making art in space, but they never did it.  But, perhaps because they lacked the internet, these artists never caught the larger public’s attention.  They never joined, on a grand scale, science to ordinary people through art.

I realized tonight as Commander Hadfield’s new video of Space Oddity went viral, that this fairly  unassuming gentleman from Sarnia has done it.  He has shown ordinary people art and science meeting together  And the people get it!

Using social media and the biggest stage possible – the sky – Hadfield has had us watch him rapt for five months as he shape-shifted from rock star to zero-gravity chef to science teacher to science fiction character to military commander, and, finally, to a fifty something man with a crew-cut and moustache who actually pulls off a self-shot music video of his own acoustic cover of perhaps the most iconic Bowie song.  Whatever the flaws of adaptation or performance, Hadfield has capped his inspiring public Space Odyssey with a piece of art that captures the tension apparent in his earlier collaboration with Ed Robertson, the tension between the to most  unknowable joy of looking down on Earth from a home in the sky and the universal human joy of standing at home on the Green Hills of Earth.  No longer the story of an ominous malfunction of Major Tom’s capsule which leaves the astronaut stranded, Hadfield’s revised Space Oddity is a bitter-sweet lament for the end of his stay on the Space Station and his final return to earth. He is facing an inversion of Bowie’s original conceit of the Marooned Astronaut  –  Hadfield knows that it is to Space, not to Earth, that he will never return. With this recording Hadfield has turned a once inconceivable  Space Oddity – a Canadian kid from Sarnia becoming the tweeting rock star commander of the International Space Station opening hailing frequencies to Captain Kirk – into an Odyssey of Space very true to the spirit of the Greek epic poem.  Although at last he stands on the shores of Ithaca, he can’t help but look longingly back at the Cosmic Ocean he has sailed.

Hadfield has put himself up there and made a point of making art with us and for us from that tin can he’s sitting in.  He makes us all feel like we’re there with him, doing science, looking down on our blue home, feeling wonder at the speed and the vastness.

And we can’t help but sing along.

Thank you, Commander Hadfield.

We can hear you, Major Tom!

Safe landing!

On “Louis: The Heretic Poems”, by Gregory Scofield

In Louis: The Heretic Poems Gregory Scofield has created a moving and troubling poetic biography of Louis Riel. Combining his own imaginings of Riel’s (and others’) poetic musings — in English, Cree and a little French — with found poetry from such sources as Canadian Government immigration propaganda and House of Commons debate records.  Throughout is a dense net of Biblical allusion, as small portion of which I mention below.  The result is a fascinating portrait of a brilliant man thrust through his life by sensuality and Messianic drive.  Whether a madman or a prophet, the Riel Scofield brings us is wonderfully heretical.

Scofield has divided his cycle of poems into four parts: Le Garçon covers Riel’s life up to the end of his schooling; Le Président deals with his part in the Red River Rebellion and Provisional Government, his exile and his time in the Beauport Assylum; Le Porte-Parole deals in a fascinatingly oblique way with the Northwest Rebellion; and L’Homme d’État takes us through Riel’s last days.

The cycle begins in the voice of Riel’s Chipewyan Great Grandmother Marie Joseph leBlanc reciting a geneology parallel to those that open the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but the recitation is distinctly oral in texture rather than literary, and the diction while using English vocabulary, has an odd hybrid syntax — the sounds of Marie Joseph’s Dene Suline and French come through to those who heed her repeated injunction to “Open your ears . . .”  From these opening lines, Riel is a Christ figure.

Young Louis Riel then describes the long journey through the U.S. (the Canadian Pacific Railroad was still unbuilt) to school in Montreal before his two “Contrition” poems, “#7″ asking forgiveness in the voice of a budding Messiah and “#3″ singing the emotional torrent of physical love in echoes of the Song of Solomon.  These two forces, Messiahhood and sensuality, will come to be in constant tension through Riel’s life and leadership as related in Scofield’s poems.  In” The Interview” and “Communion with David”, from Riel’s time in Beauport Assylum after the Red River Rebellion, Riel sings Old Testament style Psalms (cf. Psalms 89: 19ff. and 23:5ff.) identifying himself with King David and later, in “Dear Sir, To You I Say”, Riel stands up to Sir John A. MacDonald in Messianic terms, concluding with the ominous statement, again linking Riel to Christ through Matthew 10:34, that

I am only a poor poet
A lamb with a gun.

In contrast to the Messianic passages,  echoes of the Song of Solomon reverberate through, for example, “The Sacrament of Marie-Julie” and “The Confession of Evelina”.  In “I am a Poet”, Riel is at his most sensual, describing himself like a Métis Dionysus (with particular emphasis on his hair and moustache), but in Solomonic images rather than Classical.  And it is in “I am a poet” that the important image of the Orange first appears, here as a gift from Montreal, a city he describes as his lover. And the eating of the orange is described lovingly in parallel to poetic creation:

My mouth ran sweet. My pen
Never ceased. I am a poet.

When the Oranges reappear it is in the Red River Colony: the crate of rotten fruit who are, in fact, English Protestant settlers, Orangemen, who come to divide up Métis land amongst themselves, and who will ultimately cost Riel his life. Here, also in the context of the orange image, Riel recast’s the Lord’s Prayer as his own:

â-haw kisê-manitow
mâmaw-ôhtawîmaw
give us this day our daily oranges;
and forgive them their trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us;
and lead us not into war
but deliver us from theft.

For the land is our Kingdom,
and the power of our children,
forever and ever,
â-haw!

In contrast to the deep feeling, the deep oral history and geneology and the full blooded physicality of the poems of Riel and Dumont, of Marie Joseph, Evelina and the women of “The Sewing Circle”, the words of the Government in the found poems are cold, the shallow jargon of marketing, the formality of Sir John’s political debate polka, and the drunk, sad misogeny of “Sir John’s Reel”.  The fall of Louis Riel and the Métis Nation becomes clearly a tragedy of Biblical scale in Scofield’s hands, King David is hanged, his general in exile and his people scattered, the women weeping.

Primed by Scofield’s clear echoes of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, I had open beside me as I read The Heretic Poems Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

But the deep tragedy (heresy?) of The Heretic Poems is that the Métis (and other aboriginal nations) are exiles not in a strange land, but in their own.  I, for one, am grateful that poets such as Scofield have found the voice to sing their songs in this, their own land, that they remember, and their tongues do not cleave to the rooves of their mouths, and that their writing hands have not forgot their cunning.  And all, whether rulers in Babylon or just trying to get by, must be grateful that the Old Testament sentiment of the last two verses of Psalm 137 have not been Scooped up by the heirs of Louis and Gabriel, of Big Bear and Poundmaker.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Louis: The Heretic Poems by Gregory Scofield is published by Nightwood Editions in collaboration with the Gabriel Dumont Institute.

End with a song:

A Brief Appreciation of “Tobacco Wars” by Paul Seesequasis

While Tobacco Wars is labelled a novella, a literary work this dense with symbol and allusion truly belongs in the poetry section. In the one hundred thirteen pages of Tobacco Wars, Paul Seesequasis takes us on a truly Rabelaisian journey through history and myth, reforming the biographies of Pocahontas, Ben Jonson and, indeed, the history of relations between Old World and New.  Tobacco Wars strongly echoes and remakes, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Candide and even  The Tempest by means of the forces of Cree mythic storytelling.  In the end, the centuries of conflict and misunderstanding between aboriginal nations and colonizers are massaged and reshaped and, to my mind, a new start is offered.

When I contemplate Tobacco Wars, I think of the simile at the beginning of Chapter 42 of Book III of Gargantua and Pantagruel:

Un procès, a sa naissance première, me semble, comme à vous aultres, Messieurs, informe & imperfaict. Comme un Ours naissant n’a pieds, ne mains, peau, poil, ne teste: ce n’est qu’une pièce de chair, rude & informe. L’ourse, à force de leicher, la mect en perfection des membres. . . (I use Louis Moland’s edition from the first volume of Œuvres de Rabelais, p. 439, in the Classiques Garnier series, Paris, 1950.)

“A suit in law at its production, birth, and first beginning, seemeth to me, as unto your other worships, shapeless, without form or fashion, incomplete, ugly and imperfect, even as a bear at his first coming into the world hath neither hands, skin, hair, nor head, but is merely an inform, rude, and ill-favoured piece and lump of flesh, and would remain still so, if his dam, out of the abundance of her affection to her hopeful cub, did not with much licking put his members into that figure and shape which nature had provided for those of an arctic and ursinal kind . . .” (I quote here Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s 1693 translation because it is Burns Night, 2013 as I write this, because Robbie Burns’ favourite whisky, the lamented Ferintosh, was from the Black Isle, and because I have genealogical connection to and fond youthful memories of the Black Isle. Sir Thomas was a young contemporary of Pocahontas and Ben Jonson.)

“A lawsuit, when newly born, seems to me, as it does to you other gentlemen, shapeless and imperfect, even as a bear at birth has neither feet, paws, skin, fur, nor head, but is merely a lump of raw and formless flesh.  The she-bear, by dint of licking, perfects its limbs . . .” (J.M. Cohen’s translation in the Penguin Classics volume I used in my freshman year for an introductory Comparative Literature class in 1979/80.)

Like the Medieval/Renaissance conception of post-partum bear gestation, Bear Woman, in a vividly and moistly Rabelaisian way, licks the meeting of America and Europe into a creature that has limbs and head and hope for survival beyond the 21st Century, beyond the Eighth Fire of the Anishinaabe.

Tobacco, sacred herb of the New World and addictive carcinogen of the Old, is introduced to the story as seeds brought from South America to Jamestown, Virginia in the pocket of Englishman John Rolfe.  Rolfe has great plans for his “Orinoco” tobacco, plans of a mercantile empire based on his monopoly on the sweet tasting southern leaf.

But Bear Woman, and Seesequasis’ fiction, have other plans for the tobacco, the empire, and Rolfe himself.  Unlike the history we know Rolfe dies on a voyage home to England (he actually lived to a ripe, for the time, old age in Virginia).  His native wife, Pocahontas, has a wonderful time in London Society before returning home to run the business her husband didn’t have the chance to build (in face, she died at Gravesend, cutting short her voyage home to Virginia). Meanwhile, Bear Woman convinces Wolverine, an addictive fellow, to try out Rolfe’s Orinoco. The mythical little predator goes into business for himself with a chain of smoke-shops, finding an uncomfortable, and uncomfortably funny use for the skin of Jesuits.

Through much of the poem/novella Ben Jonson, murderer exculpated by a bit of Latin, playwright successor to Shakespeare, scrambles to find his way through the New World.  This New World is represented first by the unconquerable widow of Rolfe, Pocahontas, and later by the Candidesque upsets of pirates, wilderness and capture by “savages”. But Jonson overcomes all (including Pocahontas’ resistance) and brings off a great triumph: the staging of a great syncretic Masque for the Royal Court, which James I, by Royal Decree (I can’t help but think of another Royal Proclamation) has had removed to America.

At the end of the Masque, Bear addresses him/her self saying:

“Learn to move in time, an all measures meet . . . “

And, indeed, Bear Woman throughout the story is unstuck in time, being at one moment in the forest near Jamestown, at another in a modern city, and always somehow in a mythic non-time. At the end, just before approving the wolf cub, she burrows down, down, below the city and the forest to a primeval and primal stream, and has a snooze.

In his time (in our history) Jonson was known for his masques, many produced with designer Inigo Jones, who also appears in Tobacco Wars.  The masque is a form of drama very foreign to a modern audience.  Modern producers of Shakespeare’s The Tempest are often troubled with what to do with the extended masque in that magical work.  I find Seesequasis’ decision to make the masque so central to Tobacco Wars to be a brilliant stroke:  masque and Cree storytelling are, at best, on the fringes of modern mainstream readers’ consciousness. The reader of Tobacco Wars, like Pocahontas in London or Jonson in the Virginia forest, is thrust into an unfamiliar, extremely challenging and yet potentially extremely rewarding environment.

But Seesequasis does not leave us completely at sea. Very few even mildly literate Canadians would, I hope, have no familiarity with Aboriginal Canadians mythological motifs such as the Trickster, who permeates Tobacco Wars — principally as the fellow who would be better named Trickster Seesequasis. And few non-aboriginal Canadians will be unfamiliar with the European tradition of anthropomorphized animals, from Aesop to The Chronicles of Narnia. What many readers may not remember is that Ben Jonson’s most famous and lauded play, Volpone, is to some degree a tale of animals acting like humans or, if the distinction need be made, humans acting like animals.

One very important point Seesequasis makes in the dense, comic poem that is Tobacco Wars is that the tobacco wars are not necessary. It is native Pocahontas (and Wolverine) who builds the tobacco empire, not the mercantile-minded colonial Englishman. It is Jonson, the formal, mannered composer of masques who tells the just-so animal stories. The trickster Seesequasis shows us that whatever side of the Atlantic our ancestral land lies, “if you tickle us, do we not laugh?”

The meeting of Pocahontas and European men — first John Rolfe and later Ben Jonson begins as a shapeless potential and, over the course of the experiences of time-travelling Bear Woman, of the unnamed woman who mates with the wolf, of the unnamed boy at the Residential School and of all the other mythical and historical characters, the matter is given shape and becomes the hope of a new, shared future, finally represented by the “girl born with the blood of two worlds in her.” This girl is specifically the (fictional) daughter of Pocahontas and Jonson, but there is also the ungendered, mythic human/wolf hybrid baby who closes the poem/novella with the snorting approval of Bear woman.

The hope of sharing is not just the melding of Old and New Worlds, it is the positive unity of natural and human worlds, and very clearly the interwoven coexistence of myth and reality.

Tobacco Wars is published by Quattro Books.

On listening to Q from Edmonton (finally)

On the evening of November 22, 2012, the Myer Horowitz theatre on the University of Alberta Campus in Edmonton was filled to the rafters with people who payed money to see the taping of a radio show.  For the first time in its decade of broadcasting, the show with the mysterious name “Q” was visiting Edmonton after multiple visits to every other major city in Canada.  For those of you who live outside of Canada and the many parts of the United States which receive Q, Q is two hour morning radio show which is broadcast on CBC Radio One every weekday.  Oddly, it is also a TV show once a week.  And a YouTube channel.

The host of Q is one Jian Ghomeshi, a UK born Iranian-Canadian former drummer in a rock band, former TV host, best-selling author — in other words, a fairly representative Canadian, if there ever were such a thing.

Q, like its host, is a fairly unclassifiable thing:  in-depth interviews with writers, musicians, film makers, actors, politicians and panel discussions about politics, national and international and live music — Q is a cultural omnibus and, in fact, a national treasure.  The show generally is produced in Toronto, but regularly has journeyed around the country to various cities for live-to-tape episodes.  But in the six years or so of the shows run, as I mentioned, Q had never come to Edmonton.

On the morning of November 23, Q from Edmonton was broadcast and I sat listening carefully and happilly.  Jian had as his guests (or perhaps was the guest of) singer/songwriter Colleen Brown, band Shout Out Out Out Out, sketch comedy troop The Irrelevant Show, Novelist Todd Babiak, filmmaker Trevor Anderson and an all-Edmonton media panel.  It was, of course, exciting to hear these locals on National/International radio, but I couldn’t help feeling some of the same chippiness the guests seemed to be feeling as Jian kept trying to probe into Edmonton’s “identity”, which really seemed to be about finding an Edmonton “Brand”.

There was talk of Calgary vs. Edmonton.  I can’t help think of the tired old Canadian Identity question and the stupid insulting facile answer “not American”.  Sure, there’s a rivalry with Calgary on various issues from sports, which was touched on, to politics, which was touched on more lightly, but I don’t have any sort of impression that Edmontonians define themselves as “not Calgarians”.  Todd Babiuk’s term “Magpie City” was mentioned, as was the well known “Dirt City” nickname, but those names by no means indicate that we are a city of dirt or dirty birds.  Variations on “Do it” came up a few times, and I think that suggestion may reflect a little of Edmonton.

But for me, Edmonton was all summed up in the winning entry of the “Win a Trip to Edmonton” contest, and the audience’s response to that entry.  Listeners from outside Edmonton were invited to submit a six word reason they should win a trip to Magpie City.  Many submissions praised Edmonton either highly or faintly, but the winner was an entry from Sudbury, Ontario: “Poor student. Sad Life. Need Adventure.”

The audience responded to this submission with huge, roaring, friendly and unanimous applause, in effect repeating inarticulately and earsplittingly warmly the words on the old plaque on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor . . .”  But we’re not an American-style melting pot — we’re a fermentation vessel. As Babiuk mentioned, Edmontonians (when they’re not politicians) kind of sneer at phrases like “world class”.  We are more interested in getting together, working, playing, building, creating, writing, singing, painting, sculpting, acting, talking, helping — living, than we are in self-promotion.  Edmontonians are the people who are born here, who come here, who stay here, who leave here and who come back.  We’re uncomfortable telling people we’re the best because we’re absolutely certain that Edmonton isn’t perfect.   But we are equally dedicated to the crazy thought that we can and will help each other to make it better.

Sort of like Canadians.

Many years ago I coined a phrase in a very different context, but I think it applies here:  When you own the street, you don’t have to piss on the fire hydrants.  We own a pretty damn fine street full of fascinating and varied people.  We know what we have, what we want and we’re going to make it.  We’re not wasting our time bragging about it being world class.  That’d just be pissing on fire hydrants.

Decades ago I came here from Sudbury (by way of Windsor) and I have never imagined  leaving to live anywhere else.  To the winner from Sudbury, who’s name I won’t try to transcribe from what I heard on the radio, Enjoy your adventure in Edmonton. I bet you’ll be back.

And, Jian, great show.  Thanks for coming.

I bet you’ll be back.

Dulce et decorum est . . .

Itidem, dulce et decorum est pro patria vivere.

My maternal grandfather survived Passchendaele, thereby making my mother possible.

My father survived World War II by enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy and, through no effort of his own, being absurdly stationed in Winnipeg until war’s end, thereby making me possible.

My friend Angus enlisted in the Loyal Eddies and survived the Invasion of Sicily and the Battle of Ortona, thereby making my time as a young Canadian student in Southern Italy a much more pleasant and meaningful memory.

With great respect to Horace, whose poetry I have read, admired and loved for three decades now, and with the utmost regard, gratitude and respect for those who have made the sacrifice, particularly my grandfather’s buddies in the trenches, my father’s school chums who got sent somewhere messier than Winnipeg, and Angus’s comrade, whose lifeless body Angus dug out of Ortona’s rubble . . .

it is very sweet and very honourable to live for your country.

On “Midnight Sweatlodge” by Waubgeshig Rice

 

A short way into Waubgeshig Rice’s Midnight Sweatlodge I said to myself “This little book is a gem!” but now that I’ve finished reading and rereading it I say loudly “This big, grand book is deceptive in it’s tininess and it is not a single gem but a glistening, sparkling, icy string of brutally sharp-edged diamonds.  Outwardly, Midnight Sweatlodge has the appearance of a short novel, but it is actually a collection of short stories linked together by a frame narrative — the titular Sweatlodge.  Because I’ve been rereading Bradbury lately I couldn’t help think of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, but Midnight Sweatlodge‘s frame is much more tightly bound to the stories than anything Bradbury threw together, and Rice’s stories are actually dense and challenging prose poems.  The poetry of Midnight Sweatlodge moves Rice’s novel/prose poem cycle into the company of The Decameron, the 1001 Nights and the Canterbury Tales.  Lest I seem to be giving absurdly high praise . . .  although I see Rice as serving at the same restaurant as Boccaccio, Scheherazade and Chaucer, those masters serve luxurious infinitely coursed banquets while Rice presents us with an exquisitely ballanced and beautifully plated appetizer. I hope a banquet is in the future of his career. And that metaphor has certainly run its course . . .

Midnight Sweatlodge is four stories, three told within the blackness of the healing sweatlodge, the fourth told in the days and weeks after the ritual is abruptly ended. The frame which ties the stories together is the course of the ritual and the words of the elder attempting to guide the young people of his community toward healing.

The stories in order in absurd nutshells:  “Dust” is childhood (“I bet we’d trade everything to be there again”), land rights, confrontation, death.  “Solace” is adolescence, peer pressure, human potential, tragedy. “Bloodlines” is young adulthood, Urban Indian life, integration, extended family, expectations, racism. “Aasinaabe” is maturity, parenting, prophecy and apocalypse.

Rice’s descriptions of the Rez on an island in Georgian Bay, of the woods and the lake, of the dusty roads and the run-down, leaky houses is remarkably vivid.  I have vague memories of being a child in the back of a car driving on Manitoulin Island and more recent memories of driving through First Nations land here in Alberta: Rice has nailed the light, the air, the very feel of Rez landscapes with all their beauties and tragic uglinesses and the phenomenal determination of the people.

I made copious notes throughout but the text is so tightly interwoven with metaphor and internal references that it is impossible to get into details without including spoilers, which I won’t do.  But I will reveal that Midnight Sweatlodge with disarming economy and amazing power envelopes us in Treaties, warriorhood, parenting, childhood, love, abuse of spouses and substances, Rez life, urban life, work, play, ritual, rebirth, transformation, corruption, death and the potential end of the world — an attentive reading of the novel is an experience I imagine to be similar to an actual sweatlodge experience.

I invite everyone, particularly non-native readers, to join Waubgeshig Rice in the Midnight Sweatlodge for a transformation and an education.
Midnight Sweatlodge is published by Theytus Books and if you are literate you should buy it and read it.

A Serious Appreciation of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”

No.  Seriously.  “Margaritaville”. The anthem of Parrotheads and wannabe island-escapists. That “Margaritaville”.

“Margaritaville” is a remarkably elegantly constructed little piece of literature which could serve well as a study piece in the poetry unit of high school English classes.

Disclaimer:

I am not a Parrothead. I don’t like beaches or the hot tropical sun. I could live my whole life without ever tasting another margarita and be quite happy.  And the smell of shrimp beginning to boil would make me gag.  Virtually everything about the lifestyle depicted in Jimmy Buffet’s most famous song is absolutely unappealing to me.

Now, let’s read the thing:

Google for “Margaritaville lyrics” and follow along with me.

The first verse in which Jimmy nibbles sponge cake, strums his guitar and watches the (damn) tourists as the seabugs start to boil is a very particularly set example of a very common trope in life and perhaps literature, the Unenergetic Curse of the Bloody Tourist.  I remember it in the mid ’70s in Banff when the “Gorbies” descended each summer.  And I’ve heard it directed at me when in Paris.  And, feeling improbably posessive of a wee side-walk restaurant in Penzance, I muttered the same curse under my breath at a group of Germans loudly pantomiming their desire for whipped cream — from one of those spray cans — on their ice cream.

Here’s Jimmy finding his quiet island life disruppted by the oily tourists, but consolation may lie in sponge cake, shrimp and his six string.

And, the chorus celebrating denial of responsibility that everyone sings, but no one hears:

Wasting away again in Margaritaville
Searching for my lost shaker of salt
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know, it’s nobody’s fault.

In the first line of the chorus is the open acknowledgement of the self-discovery to come over the course of the song: his life as it is is a purposeless waste, a wasting away.  A lost shaker of salt? Is that really the problem?  Of course not, no more than the tourists are a problem in his life.  Who are the “some people” who make the claim that a woman’s to blame? Fox News? Wikipedia pretends that Jimmy’s friends have told him this, but there is no evidence that Jimmy has friends apart from his six string and his margaritas. No, the “some people” are actually singular and they are Jimmy’s own lack of responsibility.

Second verse, a little different from the first.

A wonderful little back and forth between a budding realization of the uselessness of his life — his reason — and the sucking desire to continue and try to justify that life.  He doesn’t know the reason he’s living this way with no change, no development except this stupid tattoo.  But — justification — it’s a real beauty, isn’t it? Doesn’t that make the season and the life worthwhile? But, he doesn’t even have a memory of the experience.  The last line shows that there can be no reason to this life, that there is no meaning without memory, and that a mysterious tattoo, no matter how beautiful the Mexican cutie depicted, is not an experience unless it has a story.

Jimmy’s waking up in the second chorus.  All is the same except the last line:

Now I think, Hell, it could be my fault.

Not quite a confession.  Not quite an admission.  Not quite taking responsibility. But the door is open.

The third verse begins with a list of disasters in the island life: a broken sandal, a cut foot.  Such are the great risks taken in this life.  But, no worries: there’s booze in the blender and margaritas are the only thing that allow Jimmy to hang on in this Hell.  But now, after being stymied so easily in a simple activity, walking on the beach, Jimmy is ready to take responsibility at the end of the third chorus:

It’s my own damn fault.

Although there’s not any great indication that Jimmy is going to change his lifestyle, he has over the course of the song made the profound change from blaming the world for his situation to taking responsibility and ownership of who he is.  There is no woman to blame and no longer is Jimmy one of the “some people” who say there is.  Jimmy will only blame himself.

“Margaritaville” strikes almost everyone as a celebration of irresponsible, lazy, drunken wasting away, but, just lightly scratching the surface reveals that it is, in fact, a dense study of alcoholic disillusionment and transformative responsibility.  Even if Jimmy never makes it off the island, in these three verses and choruses, he has made a mini-epic emotional voyage of transformation.

In a pop song.

Do we want High School students to develop an appreciation of poetry?  What better way could there be than to show them how a notoriously annoying ear-worm works as a well-crafted piece of poetry?

A Shout Out to the Planetary Society

It’s been about half a year now since I started throwing my thoughts out from Behind the Hedge (someday I may explain the blog title) and apart from a few hints and passing references, something fundamental has been missing:  Science.

When I was just tiny, a few years before watching Neil Armstrong smudge his way down that shadowy ladder with the really big step at the bottom, I poured over my father’s National Geographic Magazines, enthralled by two things:  the explorations of the sea, mostly by Jacques Cousteau, and the planned exploration of space, mostly by NASA.  When I moved out on my own, one of the first things I did, remembering the excitement of my childhood, was to get my own subscription to National Geographic Magazine.  Sometime later, my father handed over all his back issues stretching back to the mid-1950s.  Now I have almost sixty years of the things and I remain subscribed, although the sense of adventure has faded quite a bit.  Over and over I say to each month’s issue “You climbed a whole mountain!  Wow!  Did you know there’s a bunch of old men over there who WALKED ON THE MOON before you were born?!  And they got there in what amounts to little more than a  Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of big bombs strapped to the back of it!!”

Shortly after the moon landing, I took Charles Coombs’ Project Apollo out of the school library and then made my father order me my own copy from some bookstore in downtown Sudbury, Ontario.  I still have that book.  I spent my days making.  I made sharks out of plasticene and (strangly square) Saturn V rockets — complete with lunar module concealed in the top of the third stage — out of Lego.  And I craftily built the lunar module upside down so that it could dock with the command module.

Guess how I was turned onto the poetry of Yeats when I was in junior high school.

An epigram to a chapter in Intelligent Life in the Universe by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii was a bit from Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus”:

Though I am old with wandering
through hollow lands and hilly lands
I’ll find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands
and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun

And wither the threads from that poem through my life?

I reverently lifted one line for one of my few published (very obscurely published) bits of verse:

. . . on broken roads which lead nowhere
I search for unknown goals
through hollow lands and hilly lands
sun burning on my back . . .

I suspect that Yeats, together with a well timed visit to the banks of the River Wye, lead me to Wordsworth who was so obviously a pleasant uncle (but not a “funny uncle”, despite Ken Russell’s Clouds of Glory which quite probably led me to Tom Stoppard, charmingly guided by Felicity Kendall) to the child who was the father of the man I am.

And what about art?  I suspect that a strange meeting in my adolescent mind between Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, and David Hardy’s The Challenge of the Stars put me on that road.

As a barely-past-tween, when I privately decided that painting was to be one of my lives, my first purchase was a big tube of Mars Black, because all I was going to paint was David Hardyesque space scenes.  Now I buy huge jars of titanium white and very, very rarely buy a small tube of some very traditional earth pigment, and hardly ever use black.  On the surface, my painting owes more to pre-modern traditions than to the Space Age  But, when I honestly consider things, scientific exploration — which I consider art- and literary-criticism to be — is the only thing that makes me passionate. High School acquaintances told me later in life that they thought I’d follow a science path.  Nope.  Anglo-Saxon poetry for me.

Where did that come from?

A long, long time ago I held a copy of  The Lord of the Rings in my hands in a Public Library in Windsor, Ontario and said to myself “This looks like a cheap rip-off of the Narnia stories.”  In hindsight, I was an idiot at that moment, but, fortunately, my mother reintroduced Tolkien to me for a third time — I had, without making the connection, spent a moment with “Smith of Wooton Major” in some elementary school classroom.  Tolkien made me learn Old English and learning Old English vastly improved my understanding of language and poetry.  After five years, two degrees, and a couple of publications, I left formal academia behind, again to the surprise of professors and colleagues.

Now, decades later, I subscribe to five publications:  The Old English Newsletter, which arrives at odd intervals; Canada’s History (formerly the Beaver) which comes bimonthly as near as I can figure; the comfortable old National Geographic; Scientific American; and the increasingly infrequent Planetary Report, which is a part of the real point of this post.  Except for the Old English Newsletter, I read every issue of these magazines from cover to cover.  In fact, I first subscribed to Scientific American after reading Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ mention that he, too, read that magazine from cover to cover every month.  To me, all five magazines are about understanding the world and my place in it.

But, the Planetary Report is a voice from and to my childhood.  If you haven’t heard of this wonderful little publication, it is the newsletter of the Planetary Society, a think tank/lobbying organization/fanclub/cult/bunch of really varied and smart people founded by one of the smartest, Carl Sagan and two friends three decades ago with the sole and noble purpose of teaching people that space exploration is beautiful, inspiring, artistic, fascinating, gobsmackingly neat and absurdly inexpensive considering the wonders, both practical and human, it returns and, even more, considering the insane obsenities we spend obscene amounts of our labour and humanity on.

Early supporters were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury, before his death intervened, was scheduled to be a part of a little Planetary Society get-together in a few days.  The Planetary Society is perhaps the ultimate geek club — “I’m making space exploration happen!!!”, but for over three decades this bunch of ordinary and extraordinary people has quietly, soberly, and doggedly pushed governments to push the boundaries of knowledge and pushed the boundaries of knowledge themselves during times when governments have been remarkably loathe to learn much of anything.

Today the Planetary Society’s CEO is Bill Nye (yeah, that Science Guy) and has a remarkable  board of directors, including Niel deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and the coolest astrophysicist ever (“that black guy from PBS” as one friend of mine describes him.  Sometimes Canadians can be a little too blunt.)

Some of the Advisory Council of the Society are artists, writers, Star Trek actors and, yes, one of them is an old man who has WALKED ON THE MOON!! After travelling there in what amounts to a Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of bombs strapped to the back!!

The latest issue of the Planetary Report closes with a poem and a beautiful piece of art of the sort my thirteen year old self dreamed of painting.  Inside there are stories about urban Dark Skies efforts, about the Mars Science Laboratory which should land on Mars in a few days (it’s about the size of a Volkswagen Kombi, but the technology has advanced a bit), about near-Earth asteroids and extra-Solar planets.  And there are projects for kids.

Projects for kids.  One of the finest things the Planetary Society has done over the years, finer than sending digital copies of classic Science Fiction literature and art to Mars, finer than launching member-financed space missions, finer even than sending my name (and those of thousands of other Society members) to Saturn — about the finest, noblest thing the Society has done is to encourage young people to dream, to learn, and to achieve.  The Planetary Society provides grants to young scientists, to amateur scientists around the world.  The Society has provided brilliantly creative teenagers the opportunity to conduct real scientific investigation with robots on mars — hands on!

Although U.S. based, the Planetary Society is Planetary, with members around the world and making efforts to work with space agencies of all countries.  The societies grants are available to any nationality, its student outreach is global.

And, once a year they have this thing they call “Planetfest” in Pasadena and at science centres all over the planet.   A whole huge crowd of dreamers, scientists, poets, artists, writers get together to look up at the sky and say

“Wow.  Just Wow.”

And

“Thank you, Carl.”

This year Planetfest happens in just a few days, August 4th and 5th, timed to watch the landing of The Mars Science Laboratory.

I’ve never attended as I am, perhaps ironically in the context of the Planetary Society, a bit of a homebody, but if there were ever a crowd I’d have a laugh being a part of, it would be this one.  I’m not recruiting for the Society.  I’m not suggesting that anyone who might read this should run out and buy a membership (although that would be fine, if the fit is right).  What I am interested in doing is letting people know that the Planetary Society exists, what it’s for,  and what sort of person ends up as a member.

I am a working artist, a lover of theatre, a reader of poetry, and absolutely the most inspiring thing I can imagine is exactly what the Planetary Society was created to do and exactly what Art, Theatre and Poetry are for: to help us all to understand where we are in this inconceivably huge existence.

It’s a perfect fit.

Update, September 4, 2012:  A few days ago I was having a silly conversation about googling one’s self and I came across this brief blog post by Charlie Loyd in which Carl Sagan and I are associated through a fairly obscure aspect of Old English poetry.  It seems I have come full circle, in a sense: inspired to poetry  by Carl Sagan as a child and then associated with him through poetry much later in life.  It is a funny old Cosmos, isn’t it?

A visit to Dirt City/Dream City

It was raining this afternoon as I moved about the Quarters clutching my map of Dirt City/Dream City.  If you get the chance, rain or shine, turn a corner or go down an alley before the end of July and be surprised by a day-brightening bit — or lot — of art. Today the Quarters was alive with people quite obviously not usually there, people seeking out the art.  I understand Tix on the Square ran out of its free maps of the exhibition early in the afternoon.  I printed my own copy of  the one online.

I think I nearly found all the artworks.  Let’s see . . .

First up (on my route) is Jill Stanton’s parking lot sized painted pebble faux mosaic “You will be okay” — the title is the text — a huge statement of reassurance to a depressed and cloudy sky.  The colours are the colours of sidewalk chalk and I couldn’t help but think of “The Edmonton Remand Centre Newspaper” and Lindsay Bond’s photographic project documenting it.  “You will be okay” is a gargantuan shout of all the messages chalked each day on that nearby sidewalk it marvelous.  A marvelous and thought provoking piece of ephemeral art.

A little further west on 102A Ave is “Futile Fancy” by Jes McCoy.  From a distance I thought of the mini-golf set-up at Fort Edmonton Park.  Close up I thought of a playground but an oddly and intriguingly non-functonal and perhaps unfinished playground.  Then I realized it is an obstacle course.  Perhaps the apparent non-functionality and unfinishedness makes Futile Fancy a metaphor for the City itself.

Around the orner, beside the old Koerman Block, present home of the Hung Fung and the Alberta Kwan Ying Athletic Clubs, is Tiffany Shaw-Collinge’s “Garden Reflections”, a beautiful sudden garden of straw planters, beautifully complementing the old wall with its faded painted ads.  Despite the rain, I wanted to sit and enjoy the curve of the paths and the warmth of the soil. Having long been fascinated with Jeremy Bentham, I found the allusion to his Panopticon prison design both interesting and, in this context, thought provoking.

Up on 103A Avenue, there is a “Lonely Mountain” by Mackenzy Albright and Rachelle Bowen, although how such an inviting, stairway riven mountain could be lonely I don’t understand, especially with Jackson McConnell’s whimsical lollipop tree and cartoon city “Campsite” tent right at its foot.

At the far north of the exhibition space, on 104 Avenue, is Holly Newman’s lovely poem of loss and hope, “Crow’s Advice” on a series of banners.  As well there is a wall of tags on which to offer advice for mending a broken heart and tiny fabric hearts to take away as payment for suggestions.  “Crow’s Advice” surrounds Emily van Driesum’s “The Placebo Effect”, a grove of cut poplar saplings, literally (in a figurative sense) stitched into place, drying and fading as the days pass, a bit of a forest in the Quarters, but a placebo, not the real thing.

More than half of the large works in Dirt City/Dream City are concentrate at the corner of Jasper Avenue and 95 Street.  Nickelas Johnson’s “Ripped off and Red” is the most eye-catching, a huge, red-painted severed hand lying palm up in the green grass.  Nearby is Aaron Paquette’s beautiful “Everyone is Welcome”, an uncovered tipi frame sheltering an apple tree and surrounded by a flower garden. The whole is set on something of a medicine wheel.  The coloured cloths hanging from the tipi poles bring to mind a visit to the Rib Stones east of Edmonton, where similar but smaller bits of cloth perpetually hang from the branches of the poplar grove near to the sacred stones.  The Quarters, a very human place,  like every human space, is a sacred space.

Across Jasper is Destiny Swiderski’s monumental rope structure “Dream Catcher” completely prepared to catch some exceptionally big dreams.  I expect such dreams will come.

A number of pieces are on billboards and might too easily be ignored.  Nickelas Johnson’s “Tent City” is a beautiful, slightly abstracted design of tents in blue.  Matt Prins’ “Billboard for 91.2 FM The Mouth Hole” is a lovely parody of the many obnoxious ads for radio shows that litter every city.  As well, the billboard is a real ad for a fictional program on the real very low power radio transmitter (91.2 on your FM dial) that can be picked up in a very limited area around the Artery (9535 Jasper Ave.)

“My Heart is in Quarters” by Aaron Paquette is a truly lovely painting, an image of three peacefully sleeping figures, a family, in Paquette’s usual style of bright, solid colours, strong lines, and gold leaf.  I first encountered and was struck forcefully by Paquette’s work in the Narrative Quest show earlier this summer at the RAM.  For me, “My Heart is in Quarters” is a high point of Dirt City/Dream City.

Carly Greene’s “Simulacrum” is easy to miss:  clothes hanging from lines between buildings.  But the clothes are hung with iron pins, intended to rust and streak the clothing, marking them with history as the old buildings of the Quarters are marked with their history.  Certainly this day of rain in Edmonton will help complete Greene’s vision.

Andrew Buzschak’s “Pulse Points” are scattered throughout the Quarters, easy to miss blue signs on poles, a little like slightly shortened street signs.  But, look more closely:  Buzschak has used phrases from the City’s urban renewal boosting literature in an ironic and cautionary contrast to the current state of some areas of the Quarters.  The signs are lit in the evening by solar powered lights which will certainly make the pieces, and their message, stand out very well.

Unfortunately I didn’t see Adam Waldron Blain performing on his violin.  what a wonderful addition to the exhibition his music would be.  Together with the soundscape provided by 92.1 FM, live music makes Dirt City/Dream City an inspired moment in the history of the Quarters.

And history is something that runs through the entire exhibition.  The history of the community that has been here, that is here today, and that will continue to be here in the future, whatever the bulldozers and builders may have in store.  Dirt City/Dream City is a gentle warning, a firm reminder, and, from what I saw today, a much visited statement that the Quarters is not terra nullius.  This is a community, a community of communities with a rich history and a vibrant present.  Both must be recognized and respected if future redevelopment is to be itself something living rather than just a dead pile of concrete, steel and polystyrene.

 

It’s summer.  Go down to the Quarters and have a walk around.  See the art.  See the communities so often ignored.  Think.  Consider.  Remember.

And know that no Dream City ever becomes real without a Dirt City to live in.

Update, July 31: it’s just been announced that Dirt City/Dream City has been extended to the end of August.