A Poem by Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)

FORECLOSURE

Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws

Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace

Models, Figures

Those timeless days between Christmas and New Year's, when the parents, if not hosting an open house, were getting drunk at one; when I could sit at my desk undisturbed, making models, painting figures, absorbing what would one day come undone.

Feeling nostalgic, I googled these figures.

Here is the back of an earlier version of the Airfix "Indians" box:

Here are those same "Indians" paired with "American Civil War Artillery":

And here are some of these figures painted:

Love the dry-brush work on the "U.S. Calvary" figure, far-right.

Ravens and Prophets (1952)

Among the gifts I received this Christmas was George Woodcock's travelogue Ravens and Prophets (1952). I suspect this book was given to me based on my recent travels through British Columbia, a trip that Woodcock, his wife Ingeborg and their New York friends David and Audrey undertook in the late-1940s.

Books like Woodcock's are invaluable when it comes to details of places we think we are familiar with, but also the time it once took to travel between these places -- cars, roads, boats and waterways being slower then than they are today.

Although I am only twenty-five pages into Ravens and Prophets, I am more than a little uncomfortable with Woodcock's snotty Britishness, an attitude that was common to the 1960s and 70s Vancouver I grew up in, where culture, it was believed, was not so much made but received (from Britain).

Worse is Woodcock's descriptions of the people he encounters, from the couple that he and his undescribed wife are travelling with ("David is a tall, dark, crinkly-haired Jew"; "Audrey, a dumpy girl with finely cut features, the daughter of an old Polish Jewish anarchist family") to a "fat Cowichan squaw" and "slow [Chinese] men with their gaunt brown faces over which the skin stretches tightly to give an almost mask-like quality to their patience, and the bustling, round-faced Chinese of the younger generation." This from a man described on the BC Bookworld website (in an unattributed quote) as "quite possibly the most civilized man in Canada."

One paragraph that carries more than the usual reductions comes at the end of the second section in "Part One", as the Woodcocks, David and Audrey visit the "lower part of East Hastings Street," "one of the seedier ends of Vancouver":

The threadbare, bottle-nosed men who stood in doorways and clustered at the street corners -- each a solitary and misanthropic individual, no matter how he might try in the forced joviality of his kind to dissimulate his essential lack of interest in the world outside -- seemed to belong to the same dying age of the Wobbly papers. They were the last representatives of the Great American Bum, the obstinate decaying lingerers from an age when the migratory workers of the west aroused their rebellion against the materialistic and nationalistic standards of the young North American civilization. Today the majority of these workers have surrendered to the allure of enlightened capitalism, with its high wages and high standard of living. Even the struggles of the 'thirties are forgotten -- youths of twenty do not know of such events as the occupation of the Federal Building in Vancouver by the unemployed during they own childhood -- and it is now only among a few intellectual rebels and these remaining derelicts who support the skidrow walls from East Hastings Street, Vancouver, down to Mission Street, San Francisco, that you will find some memory of the old days and some lingering loyalty to their more honest and idealistic values. (p. 20)

A musical take on the Great Historical Bum can be found in Odessa's recording of Woody Guthrie's "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done" on Vanguard Record's excellent tribute album The Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie (1972).

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

The weather outside, though not quite frightful, is cold and wet, and I am too tired to close the window, too worn out by complaints made by friends who are on Facebook, many of whom despair a culture that has forsaken contemplation and the sharing of information for quick fix attacks and told-you-sos.

A recent example of our Facebook attack culture involves the writer Joseph Boyden who, after quickly penning what amounts to an exclusionary letter in support of disgraced writer and educator Steven Galloway, is now having to answer to those unable to find evidence of what Boyden has led us to believe is his indigenous ancestry.

But the hysteria is not limited to Facebook. In today's Globe and Mail, Carleton's Hayden King begins his presentation on "ethnic fraud" by introducing himself as the son of Hayden (Sr.) and Carol.  What follows in his introduction is information concerning his father's ancestry -- but nothing of his mother's.

Does ethnic authenticity (for want of a better term) preclude a recognition of bilineal descent? Most indigenous people that I know give equal weight to both parents when introducing themselves. That Hayden King has chosen not to is revealing of an equally ongoing problem in our culture, and that is patriarchy.

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Shooting Hoops

Hornby Island Xmases (2015, 2016)