Goodbye, Greenwoods'

When I was young and impressionable in ways different from the ways I am way older and impressionable now, young and fascinated by valiant, stalwart knights in armour and resourceful, humorous heroes in tights, "under the greenwood tree" was Robin Hood with his Merry Men, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, and all things good, holding out against the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, the stooge of the even more evil King John, and enemy of brave, good King Richard.

When I moved to Edmonton in 1986, and took my first walk along Whyte Avenue (or 82nd, as I had not yet learned not to call it) I first made my way into a Greenwoods' of a different kind, but similar quality, this lavish bookstore, crowded with customers. It was one of my first indications Edmonton was going to be an all right place to call home.

Many years, hours of browsing, and well-spent dollars later, I made what will probably prove my last trip to Greenwoods' as a customer last weekend. It was a sad excursion into a hollowing, echoing, emptying mausoleum. Greenwoods' is closing down on Saturday, Oct. 6, and as of last weekend, there were just not many books left on the shelves or customers left on the carpets.

Marty Chan, on Facebook, is trying to organize a last pilgrimage from among his Friends for Saturday, but ...

An editorial and a column in today's Edmonton Journal celebrate and eulogize the store. They also explain and maybe attempt to rationalize the economics of family businesses and of the book trade in particular that have helped bring down to this whimper of an ending this precious independent storehouse of surprises and opportunities, with its knowledgeable, literate and helpful staff who filled a "Staff Suggestions" section that could keep you satisfied month after month, and whose own brand of magic was that they could find titles for you based on the skimpiest of clues about author, title or even subject matter. Going into a warehouse of a chain bookstore to search its cold computerized database to see if I can locate a title on my own (and I would pretty much have to do it on my own) based on its e-logic is just not going to be the same--even if I do end up with the book, in the end.


 
Knowing why such places close does not make its closing any easier to accept. And the rationale does not fill me with confidence about the future of the one last notable independent bookstore in the city, Audrey's. Though I hope to be a customer there for quite a while longer.


All I see right now is that Edmonton has more than doubled its population in the years I have been here, and yet, with one closed door, it becomes a diminished place to call home.



Thanks, Greenwoods', for your own kind of magic over the years.

Eva has this idea we should retire to Nice. Hot Mediterranean climate for much of the year. Reasonably close to a lot of other places in Europe by plane and train. Big enough to have amenities. Small enough not to be hard to get around. Colorful. Historical. All sorts of reasons.

Neither of us is hugely conversant in French, of course. That's one drawback, though it does have its uses. We will not be tempted to watch a lot of television. Local politics will not be as pressing an issue. And since it is a tourist city, all services are offered in several languages, for the lazy or linguistically not gifted.

Part of me resists: Too far away. Too unsettling. Too many unknowns. Too many unknowns. (Did I write that twice?--oh, oh. ) Too many risks.

That's when the other part of me checks in. "Too many risks"? How many risks is enough?  What happened to the man who used to quit a job and move to a new city for the challenges? (Answer--he settled in to one city for way too long and got comfortable. Well--began to settle for this as comfortable enough.) (Other answer--he got a lot older while settled.)

I still look for ways to get out of my comfort zone as I search for writing challenges, for ways to expand my skills. But I do not usually pursue those for publication, just for information and relaxation. That suggests that I'm just locating a new comfort zone, after all.  So to get out of my zone as a way to live my life, at my age? Shudder.

Maybe that's the best reason of all to move. To a new continent. To a new city. To a new culture. In a new language. To get over or at least confront the timidity, get on with living my retirement, rather than living out my retirement. Hell--just to get on with living. Maybe then I can quit looking at retirement as this yawning chasm of boredom, a time spent looking for ways to spend time (which it seems to be for a lot of my acquaintances).

Of course, I'm also afraid of what happens when Eva and I have no fall-back, when we have only each other as "community." My parents divorced right after my Dad hit retirement and the wall of his own diminishing capacity, and began to want to micromanage all aspects of their daily lives--in the home that had been Mom's  main domain.

What if I'm like him that way (not that I ever was an Alpha in the pack--but then neither was he. He just hungered for that position and hated anyone who got farther up that ladder he thought was or should be reserved for him)?  What if I become too difficult for Eva to live with or tolerate? In a place far from home, not quite making it possible for us to feel at home?

When will they ever learn?...

I'm not so much thinking as snorting the past few days at the posturing coming out of Buckingham Palace and Anglesey about the publishing of photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, sunbathing topless on a private terrace on a private property in the south of France on a private vacation with her husband.

First off--yes, they are entitled to their privacy, and a married couple should have the chance to enjoy each others' company in whatever state of dress or undress suits their mood and the occasion. And the south of France is a great place for getting loads of sun on as much exposed skin as you can stand or dare.

And yes, paparazzi are bottom-feeders. So too are the publishers of magazines that would print such photos. But the publishers and photographers would have no purpose without the purchasers. Popular culture in one of its more sensational forms in the making. And nobody courts popularity any more assiduously than the House of Windsor.

After all, surely after all the outrage over Diana, or even Sarah, the Duchess of York, and even recently of Harry in Vegas, the Cambridges might have been a bit more circumspect, found a somewhat less exposed platform from which to soak up a few rays? They have to know by now that there will be a loaded camera in the hands of a canny cameraperson pretty well anywhere they go. And that it does not take much of an opportunity (even in the middle of something like 640 acres) for a long lens to see things it's not supposed to be seeing?

So now, once again, it's "shoot the messenger" time for the House of Windsor. The message was, "You took too much for granted." Now try this message: "You guys need to smarten up."

But, no, they'd rather come out wildly indignant after the fact at the yellow press, than adjust to the unpleasant reality that they cannot be photogenic celebrities only when it suits them and their charities. And they cannot expect that the photographers, all of them, will play nice the rest of the time. It's the non-op photos that pay the bills, Windsors and Cambridges. Learn that lesson and quit with the pouting when your own carelessness gets exposed.

Or, Cambridges, just tell the publishers to take a flying leap. Explain that you are married, young, and attractive to each other, and intend to act on that set of facts, as couples are entitled to do. Just do it in what is truly private, and not in what you incorrectly suppose to be private enough.

Post Scriptum 18 Sept.:

I hear by the news this morning that the Cambridges have been granted an injunction against Closer, which must hand over the digital originals of the photos and start paying fines if it does not. I guess other injunctions will be forthcoming against other publications in Italy and Ireland that have also published some or many of the photos. So maybe the House of Windsor and its offspring have not yet learned not to get careless and not to get caught, but they have learned that they can fight back--something it was apparently unwilling or unable to do a generation ago. I still wish they would just say "publish and be damned." But that is unrealistic on my part.

Surprises where no surprises need be

I was really surprised, and surprised at being surprised, at the number of people (especially among my Facebook friends) who expressed surprise that a thing like the shootings at the P.Q. rally the other night in Montreal could happen in Canada. They seemed to think it was some weird American contamination of our Northern purity. What crap.

Being Canadian is a whole bunch of ways of being human, within a set of national boundaries and travelling assumptions. But let's not be so naive as to try to deny or escape the fact that Canadians are heir to all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. We are not and never have been some special case island of moral rectitude, too pure to jaywalk, let alone own or hold guns, let alone shoot something or someone with them. Does no one read history anymore?

(I know our Prime Minister and our Minister of Finance like us to think they have walled us off from the economic mess much of the rest of the world is in--but that's probably wishful thinking, too.)

We--we humans, that is, not just we Canadians--seem to have this capacity for thinking that our special way or our special ways of being human are the right ways, the paths to something everyone should be following towards. And when someone with whom we share some identity or identification (middle-aged Anglo-Canadian Quebecer, for example) does something "unusual," or even perhaps criminal, we find our path defiled, and have to assign the blame to some extra-territorial cause. Or to insanity, especially if the perp claims or seems to claim to be acting in our name.

The cause is within ourselves, folks. Maybe that's what really scares us. Not all the would-be pro- or anti-separatism assassins are Quebecois-speaking, bearded FLQers from the Sixties and Seventies. This act and the shouted claim to be among the waking (I typoed "wanking," first time, and wonder now if I shouldn't have left it that way) Anglos is maybe an exaggeration of a lot of Rest-of-Canada attitudes, but it goes only a bit farther in a direction a lot of Comments were already tending (or trending). Well, maybe quite a bit farther.

But try to think of it not as a deviation from norms, but as a partial definition of  norms.

Not a good thing, truly. But not a totally outsider thing, either.

Happy Accidents

Holidays, with a big difference this year. To celebrate the 25 years of our marriage, and some associated achievements like getting the house and car both paid off, we went to France for 2 1/2 weeks of food, fun and sun: Paris, Nice, and Avignon. I don't know how I got to be this old without having seen some of Paris, but that's not an issue now.

We had a range of marvelous times in the three cities, each so different in its ways of being "French."

Many of those times had to do with things we stumbled across getting from must-see place to must-see place. It rather reminds me of one of the concerns in Nora Young's The Virtual Self: the matter of what happens when self-trackers get so linked in to like-minded self-trackers, all sharing their knowledge of their shared interests, so that the "smart city" we live in and the virtual company we keep are all so integrated we end up in a life shaped by like-minded people, in a city so well known there are no surprises, no serendipitous "happy accidents."

I don't think she should worry too much  about this possible outcome of a McLuhanesque / Maffesolian new tribalism.  We still have to get from place to place and experience to experience, which means that even traveling on pre-set routes preferred by our peers, we expose ourselves to time/place combinations that cannot fully be "known," or tracked in advanced. And crossing from one peer group to another takes us down different virtual and "real" pathways.

That's partly because we will not always be traveling pre-set or recommended routes worked out by our peers, because in traveling from place to place, we might well be traveling from one tribal affiliation to another, from one logic of identification to another through a third that is transitional and connective.

The tribe that told us about the great place to end a bike ride, and the route to get there, will not necessarily be the tribe that told us about this great sidewalk pub where we could get the perfect local brew to ease our thirst. So in getting from bike stop to pit stop, we will have to work out a route of our own that is also the space between peer group and peer group and purpose and purpose. The surprises will come in those inter-group transitions. And the biggest surprise will be our own surprise at being surprised--at our own range of identifications, and the connections our varying loyalties create out of the differences. We make common connection out of the previously disconnected.

But as for walking into surprises, having happy accidents, in each city on our holiday, Eva and I had the experience of several times each day, going along and between nodes of known interest on the tour maps. We found places we didn't know we were looking for, and places we had planned to look for another time, but that popped up in the in-between. Not all the streets on these maps are fully identified, and what's on them is anybody's guess, at first.  Not all the angles are quite the same on the street as on the map, and not all the street names are consistently identified for non-locals.

And when we did get disoriented, locals would give us advice that was based on their own imperfect knowledge of their own home towns. At least I think they were locals. Maybe they were just French, which is not the same thing. Maybe they were not even French but other visitors having a laugh, like I did the afternoon two young North American males asked me "do you speak any English," and I modestly answered, "un peu," then gave them arm-waving instructions in French that was sufficiently less wobbly than their own that they could not detect the fraud, on to get to Champs Elysees from below the Eiffel Tower.  If they got my drift, they also got where they wanted to go. If not, they got somewhere else. In central Paris it does not really matter, unless you are crossing of a "must-see" list so you can say, "Been there."

But going from Rue du Louvre to Rue Montorgueil, for example, we were told by one older fellow to go right, up this little street, to the big church, then go behind it to the right and around to get to the street that would connect us. At least, that's what I think he was telling us, from the line he indicated on the map, and the directions he pointed in space. Maybe it had worked once, but there was a big construction project going on that cut the route, and forced us back to the starting point, where we took a left instead of his advised right.

We went up a small connector street, not marked clearly on our map and not named, and found a street of boutiques, orphaned temporarily by the construction. One boutique had in its window a dress in exactly the style and color Eva had been seeking for months. And it was on sale. Now, yes, maybe a maybe a tracker site would have spared us the detour that the maps did not. And maybe a community of trackers seeking the same dress might have got us to the boutique. And maybe there would have been one left in Eva's size after all or any other like-minded trackers of similar taste had got there first. But where would have been the delight of discovery?

I suppose, like Young, I can see how that's one thing I think the "smart city" reduces. Only the first one to make the stumble gets the fun. Everyone else gets the information, which is maybe more efficient, but not as entertaining.

And when we did get to Montorgueil, we did find the old patisserie we had been seeking, Stohrer's, the oldest patisserie in Paris (est 1730), a destination that was on many "must-see" lists (another form of sharing older than digital tracking). And it was worth the trip down mistaken by-ways that only enhanced the eventual success. I had the lemon tart. Eva the pistachio. Then we went back another day for other choices, went by a different route out of Place Bastille, because we took another wrong turn up Blvd Richard Lenoire, through a huge Sunday market, that took us out of a way we hadn't really planned, anyway. On our way through the market, Eva found a red Italian leather purse she didn`t know she was looking for, either. At least, the label said it was Italian. Maybe it was just the label that was `Made in Italy,' but it`s still a nice purse. And unlike the ones up by Sacre Coeur, it really is leather.

While on the topic (well, technically, beside it) of self-tracking and achieving community with like-minded peers of similar tastes and interests, a nit picks at the back of my understanding. What if my preferred activity is finding things for myself. Of haplessly going where others who have gone before have not documented, or have documented in places I do not search, and of not myself documenting it, either?

Try joining our community. It's out there.

We fail to meet each other all the time, all over town, irregularly and anonymously.

Fair's fair

A while ago, came the challenge of a contest to create a new name for Edmonton's summer exhibition, the fair formerly know as "Klondike Days" after a peripheral connection to the Yukon / Klondike goldrush of 1898 and after. A few hundred would be goldrushers tried to make it to the goldfields overland from Edmonton over a trail that was not really there.

More recently it has been unaffectionately known as "CapitalEx."

Today, a short list of finalists, announced by the proud sponsors:

To help us choose the finalists, a selection group including representatives
from the Edmonton Journal, Global Edmonton and Northlands reviewed
all the submissions and narrowed it down to six based on the following criteria:

1. Relevance to the 21st century ahead.
2. Consideration of the incredible historic growth and
continued diversification of Edmonton’s multi-cultural fabric.
3. Defining of the community spirit and outwardly fun
characteristics that make Edmontonians who they are.
4. Embracing of all demographics from new 21st century
babies through to our shining senior citizens.
5. Creative platforms enabling commercial partners to
activate and deliver diverse and intriguing experiences.
6. Agility that will allow a fresh and exciting
new theme to be incorporated every year.

And the finalists are:::

EdFest (submitted by Cynthia Chizen, Leduc County)
The Edmonton Exhibition (submitted by Jon Brenda, Edmonton)
Edmonton Summer Exhibition (submitted by Donna Zaozirny, Edmonton)
K-Days (submitted by Chad Willsey, Edmonton)  [Note: K-Days is a nickname for "Klondike Days]
River City Festival (submitted by Ryan Tomko, Edmonton)
River City Summer Fair (submitted by Joe Romerowicz, Edmonton)

Sorry--but this is the kind of list that gives "prosaic" a bad name.  And it seems to ignore the list of desirable qualities pretty much completely. In fact, if these are the six best, then maybe it was time to declare "No Contest" and revisit the drawing board.

On one Facebook site, only "River City Festival" has a single vote of sympathy. I guess it and the other "River City" option, the "Summer Fair,"  have the advantage of a recurring theme--every year the exhibition can be opened by a big parade featuring seventy-six trombones. But I hope we don't get sued for copyright infringement or have marks taken away for plagiarism. "River City" is not just a nickname for Edmonton, after all. It is the fictional Iowa town setting for Meredith Willson's hit, The Music Man.

And with the name "River City," we can annually focus our need to decorate and costume by picking a different river and its history to centre on. We could be Mississippi river boat gamblers one year, Walt Disney Missouri river pirates another. We could even get ourselves up in marching band regalia.

Courses yet to be delivered, contexts yet to be constructed

I have been planning a course for next January--an introductory course called "English 122: Texts and Contexts." The idea is to build a course around a theme that emerges in different contexts. I have been thinking of "Gold Rushes and Gold Mountain"--two variations on a bigger theme in Canadian immigration history: the "Promise of Eden" theme or the "Promised Land" theme. So many stories of risks taken to make it big in the New World; so many stories of desperation to find a place free of the limitations and restrictions of various Old Worlds.

Gold Mountain is a Chinese name for our "west" that was a long boat ride to their east, across the Pacific to the goldfields and construction camps of California, British Columbia and the Yukon. To Gold Mountain, where they found a future built on building railroads for others, or feeding those who did the building. A future of loneliness and separation from wives and children whose future depended on labours in the fields and valleys of others' dreams.

Coming from the other direction, earlier and as contemporaries, whose stories were those of the seekers of political or religious or economic freedom, those who wanted to find land a resources on which to build or extend family wealth. And of those who were sent over as spouses, servants and slaves to the first (sometimes all of the above, functionally if not legally).

The thing is, are these stories of success or of failure? And according to what standards?

Literary practice, or paradigm, becomes a determining factor as much as does actual physical or financial fate. Write a success story in which the men overcome nature to build thriving farms on the prairies? Write it in the Twenties or Thirties? If your name (pen or otherwise) is Frederick Philip Grove? Or a host of others writing in a naturalistic vein. Not a chance.

Yet my maternal grandfather Elmer Hornby (a man I barely knew, but by all accounts would have benefited from knowing better, knowing for more than the gruff figure I recall) did it. Not a well educated man in terms of years in school, but a man who knew what mattered and what needed to be done. A man whose opinion meant something in the Melfort area of Saskatchewan. A man who came west from Ontario, built a sod house, brought to it his Breton-born wife Victorine (a woman I can scarcely remember, other than as a cancer-ridden figure breathing her last the summer of 1957 from the front lawn of their retirement home on a small acreage along the King George Highway in Surrey, B.C.), herself the daughter of another immigrant settler from farther away but of more recent arrival to the St. Brieux / Pathlow area. Built the sod house in which she gave birth to her first two children. Built with her the farm that supported them and their seven children through a period better remembered for its disappointments than its deliverances.


The fact is, other than the First Nations people who according to their own stories were created here, but according to archaeology were the real first immigrants, we are all in this country the results of people who acted out stories of need for a more promising future, who listened with eyes bright with hope or desperation or illness bred of poverty and want, or a touch of all the above, listened to fabrications about this land of opportunity, of gold or of a golden age--real or figurative--just waiting to open to their ease and make their dreams come true.

And enough of them made truths out of those lies to make homes and histories for the rest of us. To provide contexts for the texts of failure and success we offer our introductory-level students, many of whom, I note from the advance class list, are coming from abroad for another kind of opportunity, or for more of the same kind of opportunity embedded in the latest versions of those stories of a golden land to the east and west of wherever they start from.

Which makes me and people like me, their teachers, their leaders-out-of and leaders-into (I think the word "educator" has roots in the Latin verb "ducere"--to lead), texts and contexts yet to come.