the green notebook,

, reading Renee Gladman + Orhan Pamuk, & letters by Amiri Baraka, Edward Dorn + Lucia Berlin,

Further to excavating my office, I unearth my copy of Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004), edited by Mary Burder, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott. I’ve been thinking about the sentence, even moving back into the first few pages of my second novel, Missing Persons (2009) for the sake of a post connecting the introduced-character Alberta to her later self, within the pages of On Beauty.

“In the field of our thoughts,” begins Renee Gladman’s “The Person in the World,” “in thinking of existence (being-existing) in time and space, we have the most absolute of mirrors: the sentence.”

There are ways in which writing can’t help but reveal, including to ourselves; elements not conscious at the time of writing, but beneath the skin. What am I telling you? In a recent review of On Beauty, the reviewer speaks of the female narrator of a particular story, seemingly unaware that the story didn’t specify the narrator’s gender, her response thus broadcasting how this particular story connected. The reviewer even sent along a draft, and I pointed this out to her, but apparently none of my comments or corrections made any difference.

*

The young ladies and I move an afternoon through various thrift stores, as Rose requires a new outfit for an upcoming school dance. They have school dances in grade six now? I chance upon a paperback copy of Orhan Pamuk’s ISTANBUL: Memories and the City (2005), translated by Maureen Freely. I’m fascinated by this occasional series of city books, having gone through Australian writer Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney (2001), each writer offering their thoughts on their cities of origin. I also went through Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s Homage to Barcelona (1990) at some point, but that was a very different thing, as much as I enjoyed it. The series, if it is even that, appears to focus as non-fiction memoirs-as-love-songs to an author’s city of origins, their home-place.

Ever since first encountering Carey’s title, how many years back, I’ve been curious about the possibility of working on a potential volume on Ottawa. The capital city, after all, with a rich and storied history, despite a mythology of staid dullness the media can’t seem to shake. I’ve always seen myself holding a kind of dual sense of geographic origin: equally Ottawa, where I was born and have been since nineteen, and Glengarry, where I was raised, and my father’s roots on our particular concession road go back to the 1840s. My origins are a bit more layered, less a singular; even moreso through the fact of being adopted, offering further layers of complexity. If I allow for such, I suppose, which I certainly do.

Oh, to have infinite time. If such were possible, I would be working a non-fiction volume on the Gordon Church, St. Elmo, the church of my youth and where Christine and I were married, the final wedding before de-consecration. I would research and write up a volume on Caledonia Springs, the large luxury mineral springs spa and hotel nestled in eastern Ontario from 1830 to 1915—a rail line was even constructed to deliver wealthy visitors, including heads of state—somehow wiped not only from the grounds but from living memory. Disappeared, as it were, from history.

As Pamuk writes: “Here we come to the heart of the matter: I’ve never left Istanbul – never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood. Although I’ve lived in other districts from time to time, fifty years on I find myself back in the Pamuk Apartments, where my first photographs were taken and where my mother first held me in her arms.”

Perhaps it is true for everyone, holding to that central core of where and how one first begin to understand self, for good or for ill. Perhaps I make too much of it: Christine is from Mississauga, and her relationship to home, as compared to mine, seems less rooted, less ponderous. Pamuk writes of the randomness of any one person born in any place, any time, to any people, and the connections we make through those associations we have no control of, fully aware of the accidents of history that make us, yet still he connects to them. “This is my fate,” he writes, “and there’s no sense arguing with it.”

*

I sitting at a corner table at The Royal Oak, Hunt Club, with a fresh pint, awaiting my pal b stephen harding, as the sound of cars sweep through the slush. I’m moving through Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960 (2009), and wondering about how more contemporary interactions might be archived, and if email would hold the same weight as a physical letter from those days of more than half a century ago. We don’t write letters in the same way, after all. The invention of the telephone will be the death of letter writing, pundits told our grandparents, our great-grandparents. Apparently Richard Brautigan was famous for telephone conversation. An album I’ve only seen mention of, in which he talks on the phone.

I wonder if the ways in which we interact as writers has shifted, those conversations worth archiving more in the public realm (essays, reviews, conferences) than through correspondences, although there are most likely exceptions. Will there be published volumes of ‘selections from the collected emails’ to appear down the road? Possibly, who knows. I know Derek Beaulieu sends his email correspondence digitally into his literary archive. Will anyone go through it?

J.A. Weingarten has been editing a volume of John Newlove’s letters for years, a volume I’ve been eager to see, and I think I might even be part of, most likely out next year. John and Susan Newlove, who lived half a block, and then a full block, away from those Chinatown hovels I spent too many years living and writing in. I am curious to see what Weingarten has found and collected. “If we think of a text as defining political boundaries and providing historical continuity, as Dorn’s friend and colleague Gordon Brotherston put it in Book of the Fourth World,” editor Claudia Moreno Pisano writes of the Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn correspondence, “these letters constitute the history of these men and their times better than many other forms of documented history.” There is the main narrative of history, and then in the margins, where just as much history occurs. All those Elizabeth Smart journals.

Or, in “Let Us Hear About Your Progress”: Letters Between Lucia Berlin, Edward Dorn, & Jennifer Dunbar Dorn (2024), edited by Megan Paslawski, as American short story writer Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) refers to Richard Brautigan as “Asshole Brautigan.” Wait, what? Oh, I want to hear more about that.

Wikipedia offers that Lucia Berlin published a handful of books, none of which I’ve heard of. She also had a series of health problems throughout her life, and died in Marina del Rey, California on her sixty-eighth birthday, with one of her favourite books in her hands. I would be curious to know what book, and what that might say about her. I suspect it wasn’t Trout Fishing in America (1967).

*

A few days’ worth of snow-fog, a mist that shifts from releasing snow to a brief freezing rain and into an occasional drizzle. The temperature hovers around freezing, but is just above, at least. The rain might not be reducing the layering snow, but hasn’t evolved into a coating of ice.