Stopping People

Stopping strangers has become a habit of mine. Habit might be too strong of a word. Tendency, perhaps.

Before moving to the city, I explored a Vancouver neighbourhood to see if it was an area I wanted to consider living in. I walked the streets and stopped a girl who looked about my age. “Hey, do you live around here?”

My neighbourhood

She did. She liked it. That was enough for me.

A week later, I moved and ran into her on the way to Granville Street. This time she stopped me.

“So you moved here?”

“Yeah, I did!” I was excited to make my first friend in the neighbourhood.

Turns out we live four buildings away from each other on the same street. A few days later, she came over one evening to help me eat brownies. We shared our stories.

There are so many people to meet, I can get overwhelmed thinking about it. So many possibilities, so many conversations, so many intersections.

Possibility

My friends laugh when I tell them about my street-stopping antics. I think they think I just go up to everyone now and talk to them. This is hardly the case. There are some people who I won’t stop. Or just don’t.

I started thinking though, is it really strange to stop people? It’s normal for this guy, and look at all the amazing stories he hears because he simply stops people on the street and asks them a few questions. I know it’s his job, but still. What a great job.

I recently met my apartment neighbour for the first time. I guess I could have knocked on her door if I really wanted to meet her earlier, (I was fairly certain she was a girl because of the wreath on her door), but I like when things happen more naturally. For instance, we both happen to be locking our doors at the same time, climbing up the stairs, or collecting our mail. And so it happened in such a way the other day. I arrive on my floor and hear the sound of a key turning. It sounds like it’s near my suite so I walk a little faster to make sure I don’t miss the few seconds between the opening and closing of a door. I’m not too late.

The open door

“Hey neighbour!” I exclaim. “I’ve been waiting to meet you!” (No, I don’t say the second part, but I’m thinking it).

“Hey!” she says back. She’s slightly older than I am, fiddling with the handle on a piece of luggage. Turns out she wasn’t around earlier anyway because she had gone abroad for a month. She welcomes me to the building. I welcome her back to Canada. We don’t talk long, but long enough for me to think I’d like to invite her over sometime. She says at the end, “Thanks for saying hi. You’re the first person who’s ever introduced themselves to me in this building.”

“Oh, really? How long have you lived here?”

“Four years.”

Four years and no one’s ever said hi?! Not even over the one token laundry machine in the building shared amongst thirty people where you’re bound to run into someone? But I’m not really shocked. You can see how easily it happens. Wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep. Repeat. Everybody in their separate apartments, separate cars, separate spaces, separate worlds. As I asked last week, “Are we together or are we alone together?”

Are we together or are we alone together?

I’m finding I’m getting stopped myself more often. Maybe it’s that idea that what you put out into the world, you get back. Some kind of magnetism.

I got stopped for two hours on the Seawall last Sunday from a grandfatherly Greek man who approached me with the question, “How’s the book?”

I am slowly working my way through The Brothers Karamazov (my summer project) and the answer to that question is not a simple, one-word answer. It’s mentally and spiritually exhausting and exhilarating at the same time and maybe I was relieved to have someone to talk about it with. Some books scream to be discussed and when you’re not sitting in an English class anymore, you have to work harder to make it mean something. The funny thing is, we didn’t end up talking much about the book, and I didn’t end up doing most of the talking. I think he really needed to tell his story to someone so I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I sat on the bench and listened. He wants to write his story in a book one day, but he told me the time is not yet. He has to go away to write it.

How’s the book?

In my Ottawa life, I lay on a bench one afternoon, eyes to the sky, soaking up the sun behind the Parliament buildings when another stranger stopped me. He asked me what I was thinking about. I don’t recall I was thinking about anything profound but his question intrigued me. Hardly anyone begins a conversation this way.

What are you thinking about?

In one of my short stories, a girl stops a guy who is painting en plein air and it is the start of something new for each of them.

I think I like stops so much because they aren’t really stops in the sense that they’re roadblocks or endings. They’re more like beginnings. Time out of the day to see someone or something differently. I wrote about another one here.

Time to see differently

After encounters like these, I often think, “This should happen more often.” There’s something kind of magical about strangers’ lives intersecting at a particular moment in time, in a particular space, for a particular conversation that both people probably need to have.

You come to someone and they come to you. Of course it’s a little scary, but then I remember Jim’s words to Laura in The Glass Menagerie:

People are not so dreadful when you know them.

And it’s true. They’re lovely, actually.

the people are the city

The Wall on the CBC Plaza, Vancouver

“the people are the city” by Paul de Guzman, 2013

 

red letters by Charlene Kwiatkowski

 

on Hamilton Street in Yaletown

red letters on a concrete wall

reach me with their lower-case lives

 

not big enough to record in history books

but big enough to stop me

a traffic light on the street

 

that’s me on the ladder

that’s you measuring the frame

that’s him showing us where to lay the beam

 

we are building on a building

stories in a story

texts on an architext

 

isn’t this an image of us all

working on our lower-case lives

carpenter clothes like lab coats

 

experimenting with an idea

incomplete, we can’t see

but we dream dream dream

 

the excitement is building

the building is excitement

we are the building

 

but look at all the walls

we don’t touch, talk about, or share

and this image is not at all like us

 

people work together

people work together

people work together

 

is this real or wishful thinking?

is the city plural?

are we together or are we alone together?

 

say it three times

the holy trinity of incantation

that makes the imagined real

 

read the red letters

again and again

and again

 

Description of The Wall. Click the picture for a bigger view.

The artist’s statement, which ties into my poem. Clicking on the picture will take you to a website where you can also read it.

Views from the Top

I’ve stood on three rooftops in Vancouver, and two of them in this past week. That’s quite a lot considering I just moved to Vancouver about a month ago.

When I studied in London one summer, I took a course called Literature and Place. Our introductory readings included excerpts from French theorist Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, and in particular, his chapter called “Walking in the City.”

Like most French theorists, de Certeau has obscure theoretical concepts for what are actually pretty simple, everyday things. His main distinction was between strategies and tactics and the two groups of people who use them. Governments, institutions, and other dominant power structures are what he calls the producers of strategies. Strategies are ways we are taught to read and interpret the city.

Where there are producers there are consumers, and that includes the rest of us individuals who fight back (consciously or not) against producers’ strategies with tactics.

This all sounds really abstract, but de Certeau breaks it down into some practical examples. Strategies include maps that City planners make to present the city as an organized, unified whole. Buildings also function in this way – particularly skyscrapers or other high-rise towers that offer the visitor or tourist a synoptic view of the city that is easy to digest.

Consumers fight back against these strategies through tactics that can never be fully predicted by the producers. Jaywalking is a tactic because it goes against the official grid that City planners have mapped out—especially in a quintessential grid city like New York. Locals know the shortcuts and the detours. They can cheat the producers. It’s like one big urban battlefield. I think de Certeau’s point (at least an oversimplified version) is that the practice of everyday life in the city involves this tension between producers and consumers.

Strategies are especially effective on tourists. I can speak from example. Whenever I’m in a new city, I seek out high places early on in my trip to give myself a bird’s eye view of the place.

Take New York. I visited the Empire State building on one of my first nights there. In London, there’s the London Eye, whose name even alludes to this panoptic vision of the city. Manchester has one too. In Ottawa, there’s the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill. In Toronto, the CN Tower. In France, the Eiffel Tower. All these places are especially marketed for tourists, and I think they work because when you’re new to a place, you’re vulnerable. You often don’t know the language, the customs, or the way around. Seeing the city from above gives you a sense of control, even if it’s illusory. You get a feel for where neighbourhoods are in relation to other neighbourhoods, where landmarks are located, and a sense of the size of things.

But this perspective isn’t the “real” city. The real city is experienced at street level where the consumers have a local knowledge of how to get from A to B, which stores are open and when, what streets to take and which ones to avoid due to traffic, construction, panhandlers, or who knows what reason, and a whole list of other insider information.

I feel like I’m in the transition stage between being a visitor and a local in Vancouver. Standing on two rooftops this week, I was struck by how very different Vancouver is than any other city I’ve lived in or visited. Vancouver is the only one that doesn’t have an open-to-the-public tower or high-rise offering a panoramic view of the city (at least not to my knowledge). Vancouver is so private. We love our million dollar views but we keep them to ourselves.

I would never have stood on the rooftop of the Sheraton Wall Centre in downtown Vancouver this week had I not been part of a launch party for a condo website I write for. The concierge had to swipe a card in the elevator so I could even access the 35^th floor. The other rooftops I experienced in Gastown and False Creek South resulted from knowing someone who lives in the buildings.

Needless to say, I don’t take these views for granted, especially since they’re so hard to come by when you’re new to Vancouver. And I’m not going to deny it—I love the view from the top. I may be participating in producers’ strategies by relishing these confidence-boosting vistas but I cannot help but equate rooftops with happiness. There’s something about physical height that simultaneously heightens my spirits. I feel on top of the world.

What’s your strategy/tactic when you visit a new city? Do you seek out high places or do you stick to the streets?

The Art of Losing Part 2

Part 1 was over here. Some writing prompts are like music albums you listen to over and over again until you get sick of one artist and start playing the next until the same fatigue sets in.

I’ve sat with this prompt for a while. It’s spawned a number of pieces, some fiction, some commentary. There’s a time to create and a time to analyze. This piece was one of the more rare times I wanted to analyze and dig out the English Lit student in me. Holden Caulfield in The Catcher and the Rye talks about how certain works elicit such a response that you want to call up the author afterwards:

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

The speaker in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” has a similar effect on me. I don’t necessarily wish she was a terrific friend of mine, I just wanted to understand better what she was doing in the poem, and why it’s called “One Art” when a much more obvious title would be “The Art of Losing.” (Yes, I’m going ahead and assuming the speaker is a woman). So I penned some lines in response to her words, which obviously had a strong impact on me and is thus one significant measure of a good poem in my opinion. As a wise person once told me in regards to many, if not all, things in life, “Response matters.” So here is the poem again and here is my response:

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

 

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

—

Of course it’s a disaster. That’s exactly why she writes it. The whole poem smacks of audacious overstatement—I’ve lost cities, rivers, continents—followed by glib understatements—and their loss was no disaster. And their loss was no disaster? You don’t write it if it doesn’t bother you. That’s why it’s one art. The art of losing is the art of writing. She masters the art of losing by writing it. The loss isn’t such a ghost if it can be kept on paper, recorded like an item on a grocery list.

Yet by writing it, she fails miserably at the very art she’s trying to practice. Writing remembers. Writing says it mattered. Writing says I am losing it all over again. I am losing you all over again. You don’t force yourself to Write it! if you believe it. Even if you convinced yourself it was no big loss, no big deal at the beginning, you’re not convinced anymore.

Loss isn’t an art. It’s loss. Same with the speaker’s art. Looking less and less like a master(piece) and more and more like disaster, the poem breaks down at the end, falls out of sync with the other stanzas, adds a fourth line and parenthetical interjections. The artifice crumbles as the loss gets more real. Art mimicking life, life mimicking art. One art. Another picture of Dorian Gray. She’s not a poet anymore. She’s lost.

A Place of Mind

Last week, I had a chance to explore the University of British Columbia (UBC). A city within a city. Now that I’m older, the campus doesn’t feel as big as it did when I toured it as a teenager (don’t get me wrong – it still is a huge campus). I guess things just feel smaller as you get bigger. The campus was dead — probably because it’s summertime — but that didn’t really matter since I was there to photograph its buildings, not its people.

UBC’s branding is “A Place of Mind” and practically every lamppost on campus seems to have a sign with this slogan. I should have photographed one but you’ll just have to take my word for it. Looks like they’re selling UBC’s physical location as much as its academic education to prospective students, as the promotional video above attests to. Inspiring space produces inspiring thought. And it is hard to find a campus as beautifully situated as this one:

Walter C. Koerner Library with marshmallow pillows in front – a public space favourite also found in Vancouver’s Robson Square

Luis Camnitzer, The Museum is a School. 2010/2011. Outside the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery on campus.

The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts

Look at that mountain and ocean view!

The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. European-style architecture meets the glassy West Coast.

I made it my mission to find the Buchanan Courtyard that I wrote about here when I talked about the non-linear path of an Arts degree. The picture from that post was not my own and I wanted to remedy that since the trek to UBC isn’t nearly so long now. The pond seems to have gotten rather murky and some of the quotations were difficult to read. I wish I spoke more languages so I could have read ALL of them, but nevertheless, here is a ‘place of mind’/piece of mind chosen from the different departments in UBC’s Faculty of Arts:

Buchanan Courtyard Pavilion

“It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.” – Sarah Bernhardt

 

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

26 quotations in various languages wrap around the poem in a semi-circular fashion

“Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” – T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

 

“The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to see it at a distance, and makes it its own object.” – John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Approaching the Buchanan Courtyard from a tree path

“Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” – David Lloyd George

 

“I saw what could be done with words, for I had a vision of a New World as I talked.” – Nellie McClung

A murky pond. Maybe even this is symbolic of the uncertainty wrapped up in an arts degree

“Write the things which thou hast seen, not the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.” – Revelations

 

“Virtue can only flourish among equals.” – Mary Wollstonecraft

An empty courtyard. No students to soak up these words when I was there. Only me.

“A little madness that springs is wholesome even for the king.” – Emily Dickinson

 

“We bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.” – John Milton, Areopagitica

 

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.” – John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

Reflections on reflective words

The Great Gatsby

I wrote briefly about The Great Gatsby before. After watching Baz Luhrmann’s version in theatres this weekend, I may as well add my thoughts to the plethora of critiques and articles out there.

If you haven’t watched it or read the book, which I highly suggest you do, you might not want to read further. In other words, spoiler alert. Then again, if you haven’t read The Great Gatsby, come on, it’s been around since 1925!

First off, I liked the movie. It was more faithful to the book than I anticipated. I don’t know why I anticipated otherwise. In fact, when I got home, I re-read sections of the book and kept muttering to myself, “Oh, that line was actually in the book!” “Oh, so was this one!” If you’re going to make a cinematic adaptation of a literary classic, it SHOULD be close to the book, but I guess I didn’t go into it with super high hopes in this regard.

This article is the best one I’ve read on the movie, commenting more specifically on Daisy’s character and why we dislike her and yet also pity her. I love Carey Mulligan’s acting and thought she did a good a job as possible to capture the ephemeral, delicate, and superficial nature of a girl like Daisy who floats from room to room in Gatsby’s mansion as fascinated by his objects as he is by her. The article makes an astute comment linking one of the covers of the book where Daisy is clad in green to the green light that symbolizes her presence but also her unattainableness.

I don’t think this was the cover the article talks about, but it’s green so it still works

She’s the enchanted object, the great American dream, all bright eyes and a voice full of money—and of course she’s the light, that green light, drawing men, mothlike, to her flame. (by Katie Baker)

Overall, I think the characters were well cast. The first time we see Leonardo DiCaprio out on his dock with the stars and fireworks twinkling behind him, well, that’s the essence of Gatsby right there: a dazzling spectacle who believes himself a “son of God.”

Gatsby’s signature smile Fitzgerald devotes an entire paragraph to

Jordan Baker is the one character who’s much better developed in the book than the movie. Would those who haven’t read the book pick up on the irony of her golf career and the narrator’s descriptions of her always reclining on a couch as if she’s the most sloth-like person to exist? Or the complicated attraction between her and Nick? It’s not surprising nothing works out between those two. I think they find themselves only drawn to one another because they’re both secondary acts to the central drama between Gatsby and Daisy. Nevertheless, Jordan perfectly wore the aloof/bored/cool expression Fitzgerald gives her in the book:

The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something – most affections conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning. . . I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

The mysterious Jordan Baker

I had to laugh at Jordan’s expression in the Plaza Hotel when Gatsby loses his temper at Tom and looks “as if he had killed a man.” Jordan is sitting on a chair, fanning herself and wearing a staged expression of shock. I think we’re meant to be amused by her aloofness. Nick’s comment that ends the scene, “I just remembered it’s my birthday” adds to this point that Nick and Jordan are only significant insofar as they create the opportunity for Gatsby and Daisy to meet, and then become wallflowers to their stories. They are the onlookers in the same room at the Plaza Hotel who may as well be watching the scene from the street below.

Tension in the Plaza Hotel. Notice how Nick and Jordan are on the peripherals of this shot.

Yet Nick is the necessary wallflower without whom we wouldn’t have a story, as we learn about and see Daisy and Gatsby through his eyes. This, however, leads to a problem I had with Nick’s interpretation – is it just me or did anyone else find themselves needing more convincing of why Nick had such admiration for Gatsby? Sure, he had never seen a man so full of hope before and with such a grand vision for his life, but is that really it? His last phrases to Gatsby is, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” I don’t really believe these words and, in the movie, Gatsby doesn’t look like he believes them either. Gatsby’s quintessential gesture is the outstretched arm grasping at the green light on Daisy’s dock, a gesture that signifies he kept climbing and reaching for more. This didn’t really strike me as admirable though – more pitiable in that it’s a symbol of the human condition. We all have our green light we extend our hands towards, and even if we attain it, something else calls to us from across the bay, an evanescent light reminding us we are never satisfied. And how fitting that it’s green – a constant reminder to keep striving. Enough is never enough. Such a “great” man and yet nobody came to his funeral.

The green light

That aside, I liked how the directors played with Nick Carraway’s role insofar as he is the first person narrator of the story (as he is in the book), but because he’s writing a memoir in the movie, he also becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald. There aren’t many roles I think Tobey Maguire is perfectly suited for, but he plays the unassuming character well (he always looks slightly surprised) and thus he makes the perfect embodiment of Nick Carraway who is “within and without.” The scene where he stands out on the balcony after the party in Myrtle’s apartment and peers into all the other New York apartment windows was probably my favourite part. It was brilliantly done, and very postmodern. The movie presents the city as the collector of our narratives – these windows of our lives that strangers can glimpse in and out of from street level or parallel balconies without ever knowing us. Closeness without togetherness (reminds me of Sidewalls in that way).

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

It’s interesting that New York repels Nick after Gatsby’s death. I don’t think Nick ever really loved the city, but his relationship with it shows the big city is vibrant and teeming with life when you feel full of life yourself, and a complete bore when you are disenchanted, walking around dead. In that sense, maybe the city is just a macrocosm for the emotions and experiences of the individual. Like a magnifying glass, the city amplifies ourselves. I think New York does this on a bigger scale than any other city, and for that reason, the novel couldn’t have taken place anywhere else.

What are your thoughts on the film?