Jennifer Moxley, There Are Things We Live Among: Essays on the Object World

            In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, wedding china likewise serves as a symbol of a woman’s things apart from those of her husband (though acquired through her marriage). When Betsy Tulliver’s husband is financially ruined, it is the thought of selling off her “silver and chany” that most aggrieves her, especially her silver teapot and sugar tongs. Should strangers, who know nothing of their value, buy them, they are certain to be mistreated and scratched.

            Her heartbreak over the lost wedding china stands in for the larger failure—of a business, of a marriage, of a life. It is as if the dishes are the only thing standing between these women characters and the suffocating truth of how great a compromise marriage has asked of them. They cannot work to earn back such things, and their one bargaining chip—maidenhood—has long ago been cashed in. They have nothing else to barter. When the things go, the sacrifice made to acquire them seems for naught. (“Red Pickle Dish”)

American poet Jennifer Moxley’s There Are Things We Live Among: Essays on the Object World (Chicago IL: Flood Editions, 2012) is a series of short personal essays on objects and how they relate to us, and we to them. The pieces connect so well together that the book feels composed as a single unit, and the beauty of the collection is in how uncomplicated, straightforward, personal and wise these small essays are; how unadorned and readable, and deeply heartfelt and complex. Moxley’s thirty-eight essays work together to unfurl complicated ideas of self, home, family and belonging, expanding out into the entirety of history and literary ephemera even as she returns to the deeply personal. This is a book essentially about ideas, told through the perspective of an entire lifetime of reading, thinking and living. As she writes in the “Preface,” the book wraps itself around a quote by George Oppen.

            As soon as I had my topic I had my title, knowing that I would write about George Oppen’s poem “Of Being Numerous.” I have always loved the way the opening lines, “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves,’” connect “things” to both self-knowledge and structural assumptions. Oppen’s poem provided me a template for writing about how things define us, as well as about the politics of things, and how they function in literature and philosophy. He helped me to explore the paradox of living in a materialistic culture that yet exalts idealist philosophical and religious traditions.

Moxley’s work is a complex one, requiring deep attention, rereading and very little interruption. We live in an object world, and Moxley navigates through what so many of us do daily, and with little thought. Moxley has an incredible attention to detail, as she writes about books, reading and living as a long, continuous thought, and the polyphonic effects of how we experience, understand and relate to the world. Her deep attention weaves through Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, her mother’s sewing machine, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Robinson Crusoe, George Eliot’s The Millon the Floss, her year in Paris as an au pair, Russell Edson, Proust’s The Search for Lost Time, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the intimacy of clothes, Moby Dick, Walter Benjamin and the experience of clearing out her childhood home after the death of her stepfather. There is something of the short philosophical meanderings of writers such as Mark Kingwell and Alberto Manguel here, or even of Stan Dragland’s Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) and Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press/writer as critic, 2005). Hers is a life lived through, in part, books, and Moxley’s pieces explore how it is we live in the world, how it has been discussed previously, and how certain things have changed, while others haven’t in the least. The fluid associations she makes are quite stunning, as is her fondness for the considered object, one thick with history and meaning, even if only her own.

            For me fetishes and talismans have always been things not only removed from human labor (as is Marx’s point), but from any social value whatsoever (use, exchange). Unlike the diabolical specimens found on the forgotten shelves of curiosity shops, and handed, like poisoned batons, from imprudent owner to imprudent owner, my fetishes are ostensibly valueless items whose special meaning remains a secret between me and the thing. This is the only way to keep them safe from the nefarious machinations of those who live to shatter the illusions of others.

            I have never bought or sold a fetish. All have come to me by chance, either as found objects or as gifts (but never as a ceremonious or wrapped gift, such as a birthday or Christmas present). When they arrive as gifts, they do so out of the blue, usually from someone I know but a little. An acquaintance who, by this gesture, suddenly seems to see into the very heart of who I am. The giver and I, once the gift has been given, will never be close friends. Too much is known already, and there is an understanding, a knowledge that would be destroyed by the quotidian banalities of cultivating a new friendship (telling our “stories,” planning cumbersome coffee dates).

            The fetish is always something with little or no apparent value; that is until, having tucked it away in my purse or slipped it into a pocket, its magic begins to work.

Seen Reading, Julie Wilson

A question began to persist: If I’m a voyeur, are you, the reader, an exhibitionist? How do readers perform the private act of reading within the public realm, their preference for the written word on full display. The book becomes an invitation to look closer. And, just think, you have no idea what emotions may floor you from one sentence to the next, and when they do, I’m there, watching. I begin to imagine who each reader might be, and how the text they read would ultimately impact the spaces in which they live. (“Prologue”)

There is a part of Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading (Calgary AB: Freehand Books, 2012) that reminds slightly of Daniel Pennac’s wholly-underappreciated Better than Life (trans. David Homel; Coach House Press, 1994), in that both are books that explore ideas of reading. Reading, as anyone who has sat with a book or text anywhere knows, is a private act, but there is just something about the person at the next table reading that makes any good reader curious to know what it is that has them so enraptured. What are you reading, I might ask? 

Originally posted online as a series of sightings, Seen Reading is a collection of micro fictions composed from witnessing people in Toronto reading in public, whether on the subway, on a park bench, or in a restaurant. Does that make her collection a series of meta-texts, composing ekphrastic stories triggered by another work? Her stories appear to focus less on the books being read than on their readers, strangers in passing she attempts to capture in short bursts of prose.

Woman and Parrot

Her grandmother’s Chrysler Imperial rumbled down the road away form the farm and into the city for supplies, leaving her, 12 years old, with a squawking parrot and a nearly blind woman scanning the excessively large print of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Maddening Crowd. No pages to turn, she curled her shoulders forward, biting her nails, and clearing her throat to punctuate the silence, reminding the woman she was still in the room. She focused on the woman’s fingernails, soft pink and peeling like discarded clam shells. The parrot called for dinner. “Oh, balls,” the woman proclaimed, pushing herself back from the table, startled by the sudden surprise of a young stranger beside her.

READER

Asian female, 30s, with long brown hair under white knit cap, wearing blue peacoat and jeans tucked into white leather boots.

The Book of Negroes

Lawrence Hill

(HarperCollins, 2007)

p 87

In A History of Reading (Knopf, 1996), Alberto Manguel describes reading as “common acts of conjuring,” a wonderful kind of democratic and articulate magic, and Wilson’s explorations as “literary voyeur” highlight and celebrate the act of reading in an intriguing way—by responding in her own series of texts. David W. McFadden once talked about writing coming from writing, but might this be one of the rare texts that comes not directly from writing but from someone else entirely, reading? Wilson structures her collection of short stories into an array of sections, each with lyric titles such as “Regret had never been the thing he did, but the thing he did next,” or “She’d thought no pain, no joy, was exempt from fading, until this lingered,” most of which exist as short stories in an of themselves.

I can’t help but wonder: just how good is Wilson’s eye, that she was able to determine not only of every title and author, but publisher and edition, and even page as well? After her initial study, Jane Goodall-like notebook in hand, was there a brief conversation, an interview process to determine what exactly the person might have been reading, or was this all invisible, furtive, and possibly approximate? I suspect the latter. Either way, Seen Reading is an entertaining, compelling read, and an interesting consideration of just what people, publicly in Toronto, at least, are reading.

It Begins the Same

He’s a boy again, riding his bike, its wheels threaded with raw meat. The dog soon catches up and nips at his heels, drool wagging from its jaw. He pedals faster and loses his footing, the flesh of his ankle peels back to resemble the soft interior of the dog’s mouth. He pushes his heel to the dog’s forehead until it whimpers into submission. He rides off. When he looks down again, the dog’s teeth chatter loose the spokes, some studding in his calf, trailing red ribbons.

READER

Caucasian male, wearing black knitted cap with Canadian crest, Sony headphones, brown cords, green plaid dress shirt, and black West Beach jacket.

Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut

(Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999)

p 48

GEIST 82 (fall 2011)

In the 1960s and ‘70s, feminists, Marxists, anarchists, anti-establishmentarians, poets, writers and artists in Vancouver, who had found no place for their work in the publications of the mainstream, began to form their own book and magazine publishing enterprises. This was the era of the War Measures act, the Vietnam War and the Gastown Police Riot, of baby boomers coming of age. the CRTC introduced CanCon and the Federal Book Publishing Policy began to provide financial assistance to Canadian publishers. Small, niche presses began popping up all over Canada, which, until then, had been dominated by a few Canadian and foreign-owned companies with headquarters in Ontario.

Vancouver, at the time, had a population of about 426,000 (about a million in Greater Vancouver), two universities, many bookstores, a thriving counterculture scene and an NDP government (1972-75). Rent was still affordable, subsidized daycare was available, and people could support their artistic and cultural work for short periods with unemployment insurance claims, welfare benefits or temporary employment through government make-work programs. There were no publishing courses then; the editors and publishers of the 1970s learned everything from experienced people and/or just by doing.

What came out of this milieu in Vancouver was an efflorescence of publishing activity: feminist book and periodical publishers such as Press Gang, Makara and Room of One’s Own; counterculture presses such as Pulp Press and Vancouver Community Press/NewStar Books; avant-garde literary publishers such as Talonbooks, and periodicals such as blewointment, Periodics and TISH.

The following pages celebrate these publishers, on the occasion of Vancouver’s 125^th birthday, with materials found in archives, libraries, basements and attics by Geist interns and volunteers, some of whom were born a year after the ‘70s ended, others almost a decade after. The young writers, editors and publishers at Geist chose materials that seemed best to represent a decade that they can only imagine, from over here, on the other side of the ‘70s.

Over the years, Vancouver seems repeatedly able to do what most other Canadian cities haven’t been able to do, and that is, acknowledge and celebrate its own rich, literary history. I’m still annoyed (and a bit confused) that nothing was done to celebrate Ottawa’s 150^th anniversary a few years ago; when I premiered the first issue of the Ottawa pdf annual ottawater that January, I had presumed it would be only the beginning of a year’s worth of attention (apparently not). Still, every city has literary richness to celebrate, and fine contemporary work that could always use more attention than they currently get, and Geist has been anchoring a segment of British Columbia writing for decades. The new issue, #82, features “Signs of Literary Life,” showcasing “Literary Vancouver in the 1970s.” Anniversaries are worthy times to take stock, see just where it is you are, and where you’ve been, something that often gets lost during the course of any journey. For the sake of the issue, the feature on Vancouver’s literary history focuses on the 1960s and 70s, during which a wealth of activity began, and GEIST celebrates small fragments showcasing a whole array of activity, some of which, in different forms, of course, is still present. There are histories of many of these, from 3 cent pulp to blewointment to Talonbooks to Room of One’s Own that have yet to be written, but this will at least give a taste and context of what was happening during that period.

New Star Books got its start in 1969, when a group of writers and editors working for the Georgia Straight, an alternative Vancouver weekly paper, published the first of several literary supplements inserted in the paper. Within a year, this group had begun to publish books under the name Georgia Straight Writing Series. Early work by bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Fred Wah, Brian Fawcett, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt was featured in the series. In 1971, some members of the group (the York Street commune) started their own book-publishing project under a new imprint, Vancouver Community Press. Workers came and went, and by 1974, the press’s editorial focus had shifted to non-fiction titles about current affairs and politics. One of these books, Two Roads by Jack Scott, a largely positive account of the People’s Republic of China, inspired another name change, to New Star Books. In 2011, the press had about eighty books in print.

There has always been an element to GEIST of the literary scrapbook, picking worthy scraps and articles from other places, as well as original articles on just what is happening, remaining, in many ways, the news that stays news. Where else can you read of the infamous Gastown Riot of 1971 against an article by GEIST columnist Alberto Manguel on Australian outlaw Ned Kelly?

From his adolescence onwards, Ned Kelly led a violent life, involved in punch-ups, assaults, cattle rustling and bank robbing. For the latter purpose, he formed a gang of four: himself as leader, his younger brother Dan, the opium-addicted Joe Byrne and the melancholy adolescent Steve Hart. Ned was finally captured in June 1880, tried for his crimes and condemned to death by hanging. When the judge pronounced the fatal words “May God have mercy on your soul,” Ned replied: “I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go.” His mother’s parting words to him were: “Mind that you die like a Kelly.” A petition to spare Ned’s life was signed by over thirty thousand admirers.

Vancouver writer Michael Turner, “one of six writers invited by the Association of Book Publishers of BC and the City of Vancouver to select ten classic Vancouver books to be brought back into print, in honour of the city’s 125^th birthday” writes a small piece on D.M. Fraser’s Class Warfare, recently reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press:

The context of the conversation, when we speak of simpler things, a break from our usual attempts at making difficulty meaningful, an explanation of what is and isn’t missing, the logic we employ to make everything as obvious as possible, as if guided by something other than ourselves, yet forgetting ourselves in the process, coasting on our logic until someone calls us on it, and we argue about that too. Which is fine, until this writing, why it looks the way it does, how I don’t feel better for it, how it takes me away from the stuff we started years ago, when we made this stuff up.

I can’t for the life of me even recall the last time the City of Ottawa worked to celebrate anything literary; my front window still holds the “MY OTTAWA INCLUDES CULTURE” sign from the 2004 debacle when our then-mayor threatened to cut numerous city services, including hospitals, public transit and all cultural funding. Shameful, that. And far more shameful that our counter-arguments weren’t a louder, more sustained noise. Given the amount of literary activity Vancouver is able to celebrate, both officially and unofficially, including the recent Vancouver Poetry Conference, doesn’t it put all other Canadian cities to shame? Where are your celebrations, Winnipeg, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary?

The Blind Bookkeeper (or Why Homer Must Be Blind), Alberto Manguel

Always according to the pseudo-Herodotus, it was the poet's blindness that gave him the name why which we know him today. As a child, the future author of the Odyssey was given the name Melesigenes, after the river Meles; he acquired the name Homer, much later, in Cimmeris, where the wandering poet had proposed to the local senate that, in exchange for bed and board, he might make the town famous with his songs. The senators (in the tradition of most government bodies) refused, arguing that if they set this dangerous precedent, Cimmeris would soon be overrun with blind beggars (homers, in Cimmerian) in search of handouts. To shame them, the poet adopted the name Homer. (p 19)

I recently got a copy of The Blind Bookkeeper (or Why Homer Must Be Blind) (Goose Lane Editions / Frye Festival/Festival Frye / Université De Moncton, 2008) by Alberto Manguel, a bilingual edition of a short essay presented on April 26, 2008 in Moncton, New Brunswich as the Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye lecture during the Frye Festival's tenth season. How can this man be so knowledgeable, so wise? I want to quote from the entire small essay. Can I do such a thing? I will be absorbing this little book for quite some time, I think.

And on either side, we continue to create our enemies. We require these enemies not only to keep the industry of war going but also to keep our sense of self cocooned. We are fearful of the stories we don’t know, and we are afraid that those who tell them will impose on us their versions of the world and that we'll no longer know who we are. We don’t want to change the plots we know for plots that we may not understand, or that may not move us if we do, or that may move us in mysterious ways. We want the comfort of a familiar face by the bed. We hold to the conviction that our stories are better than anyone else's We distrust foreign tongues and we don’t encourage translation. The balance sheet that the writers of the twentieth century drew up to show the deathly experience of war was meant to be a cautionary one, summed up as "Never Again." It didn’t stick, as daily experience has since proven. All the chronicles, all accounts, factual and fictional, all the symbols and fables woven from the debris left by the slaughter and the destruction somehow failed to build for us a peaceful or even a more humanly acceptable world. If there is a God who reads us, then his patience or indifference is certainly remarkable. (pp 25-6)

recent reading: Alberto Manguel’s The City of Words

Despite being the only item on my Christmas wish list, only a few days ago did I finally pick up a copy of Alberto Manguel’s The City of Words (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2007), produced as the 2007 Massey Lecture on CBC Radio and across Canada, including Halifax, Victoria, Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto (and not, apparently, Ottawa, where I was attending the writers festival, missing the Edmonton version). Manguel’s lecture is a conversation of the divisions between people and cultures and some of the reasons for such, telling stories of the other, stories of brothers and many others to weave his narrative of the creative power of words themselves, to build whole cultures and even tear others down.

Language lends voice to the storytellers who try to tell us who we are; language builds out of words our reality and those who inhabit it, within and without the walls; language offers stories that lie and stories that tell the truth. Language changes with us, grows stronger or weaker with us, survives or dies with us. The economic machineries we have built require language to appeal to its consumers, but only on a dogmatic, practical level, deliberately avoiding literature’s constant probing and interrogation. The endless sequence of readings of Gilgamesh or Don Quixote opens realms of meaning on countless subjects – personal identity, relationship to power, social duties and responsibilities, the balance of action – all of which may at some point entail a questioning of power and call for the resolution of injustice. To sustain the run of the machineries, those in office will often attempt to curb and control this multiplicity of readings in many ways: by simply prohibiting the book or, more subtly, by imposing a restricted or distorted vocabulary, by “blunting the language,” as Günter Grass once called it. This censorship (because of course, it is censorship) takes place in many ways, from the most dramatic to the most covert. It may ban a language entirely, it may subvert certain vocabularies, it may distort or empty of meaning certain of words, it may channel language into limp literary productions or limit it to dogmatic use in the realms of politics, commerce, fashion, and, of course, religion. In every case, its aim is to prevent the telling and reading of true stories.

What amazes me about Manguel is the range of references he can pull out to further and continue his argument, from reading Don Quixote, Cassandra and Gilgamesh into recent reactions to the Iraq War, and Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, bringing them together in such capable and moving insight as to be impossible to imagine in any other way.