Reading for something different in the way of "pleasure."

I didn't get as much reading done this year as usual. At least it feels that way. Didn't maybe get as much writing done, either. It might just be that more of my reading and writing were "professional" and tied to my teaching and other job-related duties. That is often useful, often opens up undetected and unexplored byways for my own curiosity. It's just not quite as satisfying. It feels too much like work for others, not work for my own benefit. (Though I must admit, I do appreciate the paycheques and find them highly beneficial.)

I did get a poem and a short non-fiction piece on winter into the popular (locally) 40 Below, an anthology of writing about winter in Edmonton. And Anna Marie Sewell, the outgoing poet laureate for the city, put a piece I wrote, "Wresting Place," onto her Poem Catcher website, one of her legacies (http://webofvisions.wordpress.com/). And I did get asked to join the board of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, which means I at least have to spend some more time around poets and their works.

Reading is another thing. The two books that made me sit up and think about where I have been and where I am were both memoirs: Just Kids, by Patti Smith, and The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage, by Darrin Hagen. Both are stories of lives lived dangerously, on the margins and in the Underground, lives that have led to highly productive creative careers, but lives that have also seen the deaths of a lot of loved ones. For Smith it was life in sixties and seventies New York, with Robert Mapplethorpe, working her way to recognition as an artist, poet and singer-songwriter. For Hagen, it was life in the Edmonton drag community in the 1982-1993 period, a life lived as Gloria Hole, and a life leading also to recognition as a multi-talented actor, composer, playwright, writer.

What is the attraction of these books? Part of it is the pleasure of the reading itself. Part is just amazed wonder mixed with gratitude that they lived to tell about those lives, and that they have the talent to tell it so well.

The attraction is not exactly from envy at lives lived in too kind of Blakean excess. Like the rest of my generation--every generation, I suppose--I had opportunities for the kind of wisdom that comes only from going too far. I just did not have the motivation or the testicles for it. I was of the same generation as Smith and Mapplethorpe--but not of the same reckless, relentlessly desperate stamina.  Undoubtedly I was also too chicken, to unready to risk the predictable creature comforts of home on the prairies for cold, inspired starvation in infested apartments in bigger cities--definitely not Big Apple material. And no real incentive or life-models to emulate or guide me along. If I thought of it at all, I thought that kind of life was for other people, talented people but slightly (or extremely) odd and pushed by a creative bent. And I did not really have any ambition, motivation, encouragement, or mentoring to think of myself as "creative." Then, as now, audience material at best, I was programmed and prepared to want and pursue a middle class professional life.

Then, when I got it, as a public librarian in Regina and a newspaper librarian Saskatoon in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, I was bored senseless by it. At least I had a job at a newspaper, and took to the chance to try some writing--entertainment, theatre, and book reviewing, with occasional magazine features, as a relief from boredom and for some modest-sized fish in an even more modest-sized pond kind of recognition. That last was the kicker. People actually began to refer to me as a writer. Occasionally some still do. Good for the ego; bad for the career focus.

Later, I arrived in Edmonton not much later than did Hagen, who had come from an even smaller home town, right out of high school, to find himself in the Big Onion. I was many years older, starting my fourth university degree, and waiting out two divorces: one for me, and one for Eva, so we could start over, together. I was too broke and too focused on Ph.D. studies and getting established in a new marriage and on the child that came along a year later. I just was never really the type for endless nights of drugged and drunken clubbing. So, too chicken, too broke, and too straight.

Now? Well, I've never met Patti Smith, and likely never will. But I have met Darrin Hagen, several times. One of these times I think he might remember that we have met before. That's not exactly a fair observation--when we meet at workshops and other theatre-related events, he makes the connection readily enough. But when he has been emceeing a fashion show for Stanley Carroll, in a dimly-lit venue, and is surrounded by large numbers of friends and fans, then he gets momentarily distracted and has to be reminded for whom he is autographing this copy of his book.

I have seen Darrin perform. I don't think Darrin has ever done a number as Patti Smith. Patti remains an amazing talent, though not nearly glamorous enough to be of interest to Gloria. But I do think it is an act I would go to a club to catch.

NOTE FROM JANUARY 28, FROM DARRIN HAGEN BY WAY OF A MUTUAL FRIEND:

"I have performed patti smith music. In fact, it was my first punk-ish rock chick number. Guess what song? G-L-O-R-I-A of course. It kinda became my calling card."

I really should have seen that one coming.....  A true failure of my imagination.