In this set, memoirs and memories of writers reaching to the start of the last century in Canada, through 1400s France, through 1800s China and to the artist now. It’s rare for me to read a book, let alone 3 at the same time where I would considering stocking up copies and thrusting them at people but it’s true of Shen Fu and The Margaret Laurence Lectures and Making Your Life as an Artist.
Come to think of it all 4 books are about life approach. François Villon claims he is a robber because he was poor and born into a poor family. Shen Fu is extremely poor but insists on living with artistry informing his meals, walks, home decor (where ever he’s put up by indulgent friends) as he lives the high life of wandering with literati, painters and prostitutes and claiming a legacy of poets as well. Making your Life as an Artist talks about goals as well as duties of an artist whereas A Writer’s Life walks thru all the way life shook out in general form. That overlaps with the first two books as well.
- Writers’ Trust of Canada made A Writer’s Life The Margaret Laurence Lectures: 25th Anniversary of the Lecture Series. At that link you can get the book, see podcasts, or hear about upcoming ones.
It’s 25 years of top of career writers reflecting on their writing life, giving advice, sharing memoirs. If you’re a Canadian writer and want a touchstone, you really should read this. If I taught CanLit, this would be on my reading list. Except for myself it took a year and a half to read so it might be onerous in a quick turnaround course. Part of that is the problem of good writing. It is rich and I don’t need to read more to be satisfied so its slow going.
PK Page on her early years. Edna Staebler on her long road rewriting her book on Neil’s Habour from ’47 until published as Cape Breton Harbour in ’72. In ’95 Haven’t any news: Ruby’s Letters from the Fifties was published after 40 years in a filing cabinet.
It’s a kind of a bonsai life, this writing.
Acadian writer Antonine Maillet thinking about the stories of making identity stories. “The international is so far from being personal and singular”
Janet Lunn in part was asking why do people never question her writing articles, histories, yet children’s books seems to be seen as a stage, rather than a calling.
Alistair Macleod talked about geography and how “various kinds of geographies have an effect on central characters.”
William Deverell recounted showing up at his McClelland & Stewart Press award conference drunk, in jeans and long hair and overheard the publicist say “Well, I guess he looks alright, but he’s a little West Coast.”
It includes writers from novelists, biographers, historian fiction, article writers, poets. Peter C Newman on The Establishment. Some talked more about their writing, or their life around writing, others, the writing life generally. Farley Mowatt’s account passionate account of trying to speak for non-people nature.
Josef Škvorecký talked about trials of life within censorship and wrapped up saying “one first has to entertain one’s audience, and after that, with a bit of luck, one miht also be able to say something meaningful about life”
Margaret Atwood recounted early years and mentioned that in 1961…”there were twenty of so books of poetry but these included self-published memeographed and hand-set pamphlets”. What are we at now? That much per week? - Norman Cameron‘s translations of Poems of François Villon including “The Testament” are poems from before the 1460s. They are mostly baudy jokes, pages of his last will and testament giving away his worldly possessions, including his sword which the person can get from a certain bar if they pay his outstanding tab because he hocked his good sword for drinks. To Prince of Clowns he leaves him a wish for a good afternoon. To the thief who stole his lockpick set “the louse,/may he find spittle in his wine”. To Friar Baude he wishes to leave a helmet and two guards in case someone tries “to rob his pretty cage” and adds a warning “though old he’ll set them all a dance, /he is a devil when in rage.”
A double ballad says stay clear of women; they’re trouble throughout history, citing his own case at last, who, got friends together to insult the bride outside her window on her wedding night in chants. She had her revenge in having him “stripp’d and beaten like a rug” outside her window by the law.
He had a lot of run-ins with law. “Money plagues me like a murrain” (that is, like foot and mouth disease, which is slant fitting since he was on the run and tending to shoot off his mouth.) Poems to kiss-up to people to give him a loan “with neither loss nor interest thereon, /’twill cost you but the time of waiting, Sire”. Living by wits and theft himself he admired a fellow because “his tongue was tied, but not his fists.” Among his possessions to dole are marked cards and to the double crosser, a wish for 10 lashes.
A poet that I’d rather meet on the page with all his bluster than in person, not that I can time-hustle.
I do admire the the rhyme of “et reliqua” (Latin for “and the balance still due”) to “et cetera”. No one rhymes with et cetera nearly enough.
from p. 102,And all those other skulls, that bow’d
One to another, in their day,
Some condescending, some high and proud,
And others stooping to obey,
They give no greeting now, perfay!
Assembled in a nameless muster.
Their lordships have beeb reft away:
Which is scribe and which the master?
[…]
This is my final benediction
both on the dead and the quick–Without the footnotes, it would be a much harder text to read. Fart jokes are transparent enough but women preaching in the cemetery I wouldn’t have guessed, for example, is about the habit of prostitutes strolling Parisian graveyard for customers.
Footnote 13 is my favourite footnote: “The original contains a joke the point of which is not known” which I should use as a sig line. I’m not sure why shift language, update spelling, punctuation, rhymes and some vocabulary but only bring it ahead to one century before. - Andrew Simonet’s Making Your Life as an Artist (free download, $18 hard copy). Much useful food for thought about the how and the why of what we are doing. For instance,
We live in a time when we are inundated by images: pictures, language, videos, stories, music, bodies.
99% of those images are made for one reason: to get you to buy something. We artists are responsible for that tiny sliver of images that can be made for every other possible reason: cultural, spiritual, political, emotional.
In an age of image overload, this is a sacred responsibility.or
The success of other artists is good for me […] Art isn’t a race where the winner erases the efforts of others.
Art and entertainment do different things. Entertainment distracts our attention.
Art focuses it.All kinds of interesting and inspiring ideas.
Things you need (food, sleep, love, art) you can get enough of. Things you don’t need (sugar, cocaine, possessions, good reviews, adoration from random strangers) are addictive.
Like A Writer’s Life it calls one’s attention to the bigger picture. Instead of laying one more stone on top of the last, there’s the possibility of being part of generations building a cathedral of culture. Heartening.
- Graham Sanders’ translation of Shen Fu: Six Records of a Life Adrift (Hackett, 2011).
Written in the 1780s and translated by a University of Toronto prof, this is utterly readable. It is a remarkable vivid touching story so it’s no wonder it was well loved for over a century in China. Before it was first published the last 2 of the 6 stories were lost, or perhaps never completed. The chapter Charms of Idleness includes as detailed of treatise on the logic and intricacies of making bonsai as I’ve seen. For a year and a half the couple, who were without work for long spells, were put up in a friend’s house. They brought with them a servant, his wife and child and Shen Fu cut seals or did calligraphy for people while Yu embroidered on the cloth that the servants made. They added artfulness to the daily with picnics and flower arranging and enjoying each other’s company. While there friends who were painters would come hang out, amuse each other as they ate and drank and play poem games for days or weeks, a group “who would come and go from our place as swallows flit to and fro from the rafters.” Yu knowing this idyllic time couldn’t last sold her hairpins, pawned to buy wine before the habit “dispersed like clouds by the wind.”
There are copious footnotes so you can read the main text of his life or learn, that poem line he just quotes was from such-and-such by so-and-so and read a paragraph of that poet. It’s kind of like a wikipedia for Chinese Literature. IAt that point if your poetry passed muster it was admittance to civil service. Poet and zither player Sima Xiangru (179-117 BCE) eloped with a rich man’s daughter which caused them both to be estranged from their families and “forced to open a wine shop to make ends meet until Sima Xiangru was called to court and awarded a post by the emperor, who admired his poetic talents.” (footnote 22 on p. 11)
If you want to dive in there is a chronology ad family tree. The main characters are both poets but there’s an immediacy as if they are contemporary, although with strange-to-us-mores where women can’t leave the house. But she goes to the man-only temple with her husband’s help in his altered clothes so she can see the lanterns as well.