Time and building
Twenty years of Spacing, a long-delayed publication about a long-dead character, and the satisfaction of manual labour even for the not-very-handy.
September-October 2023
Sometimes we build something over a long period of time; sometimes we wait a long time for something we start building to get finished; sometimes we build something that will last a long time. Creation and time are intrinsically linked (think Biblical God’s seven days), but the relationship can unfold in many different ways. However it unfolds, though, building something, even something modest, brings with it profound satisfaction when the time comes that it’s done.
The Sneak Peek
Twenty-one years ago, I showed up at a meeting at a picnic table in Grange Park with a group of strangers who wanted to start a new magazine about public space. A year and a bit later, after many biweekly evening meetings with a rotating cast of characters in the living rooms of various shared apartments, those few of us who had persisted published the first issue of Spacing in December 2003. Twenty years later, after a lot of ups and some downs, and in an era where print media has been suffering, we’re still publishing that print magazine (and we’ve branched out into a retail store, books, and a podcast too).
To celebrate our anniversary, we’re putting together a special 20th anniversary issue, looking back at those twenty years both for the magazine and for the city, and looking a little to the future too, along with some of the types of fun features we usually have in our anniversary issues (imagined covers from the past century, profiles of people we love). For the cover, our publisher/art director Matt Blackett found a someone to offer up a real garage door to be painted with an anniversary mural by artist Emily Mae Rose!
But it’s not just the issue – we’re also publishing a book with some of the best stories from Spacing over those twenty years. I say “some of” because it was incredibly hard to narrow down even to a 248-page book from all the amazing material we’ve been graced with over those decades. We had to leave a lot out, but we got to keep a lot of fantastic material in, too. It’s going to be a great read.
Look for them both to be available in December. And keep an eye out for the announcement of the 20th anniversary party!
What’s Up
It often takes a long time to get academic books in the humanities into print. But fifteen years is long even by those standards. I was fortunate to be part of a group of scholars who met in Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands to develop a book on literary associations and “performative literary culture” in the medieval and early modern periods. It took plenty of time to develop the idea into a book. But then, once it was finally ready, our publisher, Ashgate, went under. Our valiant editors had to embark on a search for a new publisher, and finally found one in Brill. And now, after a very long wait, the articles I wrote many years ago have finally appeared in print!
I have two articles in the book Performative Literary Culture: Literary Associations and the World of Learning, 1200-1700. One is a big honking article about how literary societies were part of civic corporate culture – probably my most ambitious academic article. But much more fun was the second, shorter piece. It’s part of a section on “literary careers,” and it gave me a chance to put together the story of a remarkable character who kept popping up in different contexts as I studied Rouen’s urban culture. Jacques Sireulde was known as the “handsome usher” (bel huissier). An usher at the royal law court, he was an aspiring writer without the advantages of education, patronage, wealth, or a sinecure that were usually needed to fulfill such an ambition. But he nonetheless built a literary career for himself by taking advantage of a wide variety of venues and milieus in Rouen, from high-toned praise of the Virgin Mary to coarse satire, culminating in an epic poem celebrating the virtue of charity. He was clearly a character – sometimes literally: he features in a play – and telling his story was some of the most fun I’ve had in my historical writing.
Quotable
“This brings me to an important nuance about the way doctors talk about evidence. When we say, ‘There is no evidence to support that,’ we do not mean there is evidence to the contrary. We simply mean there is an absence of supporting evidence. An ‘absence of evidence’ could mean that no one has been collecting it.”
- Mark Mallet, “We must end the unwitnessed safe supply of opioids,” The Globe and Mail, Sept. 10, 2023
This phrasing has been a bugbear for me for a long time. Whenever scientists say “there’s no evidence” for something, it’s always interpreted by the media and public as “it’s not true.” Which is a pretty understandable interpretation of those words. But what scientists often actually mean is “we don’t know, we’ve never studied it sufficiently.” Perhaps the wording is the result of a reluctance to admit a lack of knowledge? But it’s deeply misleading. I can remember a fuss when it was said “there’s no evidence” flossing works, meaning there were no comprehensive studies. It’s possible that absence was because its effectiveness was so obvious to dentists they’d never bothered. But it was widely interpreted as “flossing doesn’t work” – which could actually be dangerous and lead to people neglecting their gum health.
Wording matters. We need to find a different way of expressing this situation, perhaps something like “it has not been studied.” Or at least, “there’s no evidence one way or the other.”
Pic Pick
After we built our backyard studio, I extended two parts of this garden path myself, the first part over several weekends, the second, appropriately enough, over a Labour Day long weekend. I used a pile of bricks and stones displaced by the construction or discovered on site, and negotiated roots and a long-buried sunken patio. The one replaced scrubby grass and dirt, the other was a re-routing of the former path to be an approach to our new rear-yard patio and studio.
I am not especially handy, and definitely not crafty (I still can’t wrap a present neatly, after half a century of trying). I was never going to make a living as a skilled craftsman of any sort. But I find something very satisfying about manual labour, especially building something new, making a tangible contribution to the world, however small. And it’s quite natural, I think, to feel attached to something you built (as with something you wrote) – an emotional connection to something into which you invested time, effort, and also intellectual power, through design and problem-solving.
It reminded me of the book Under the Tuscan Sun, briefly one of those books everyone read (and later a terrible movie with the beautiful but not especially good actress Diane Lane). Reading it was mysteriously satisfying, and later the Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente put her finger on its appeal – this story of the restoration of a Tuscan villa was essentially a fantasy of manual labour, of making or restoring something concrete with one’s hands. It spoke to a different kind of physical desire, one for working with the body, culminating in the completion of modest monuments.
The satisfaction of building something that will last for a long time makes me think of war, including some of those raging today. Of course the worst tragedy of war is the deaths. But a secondary tragedy is the destruction of things that people spent a lot of time and energy, and perhaps love, creating and then using. It’s not just monuments – it’s houses, gardens, parks, public spaces. Things can get rebuilt, of course – we visited Warsaw a few years ago and saw the impressively rebuilt old city, for example. But it’s never exactly the same, and is still a horrific waste of people’s labours.
The Shout-Out
My friend Jamie Bradburn has long explored the curious byways of Toronto’s history for a variety of publications (including Spacing). He recently started a new substack newsletter, where he is sharing some of his past and current work. His recent newsletter “Down with Dullness” serves as a kind of manifesto:
“This view of history [that it needs grand events to be interesting], especially local history, ignores the fascinating stories that make up our day-to-day lives. Gaining perspectives on how people lived, how their environment shaped their actions, the societal forces which motivated their thoughts, the little things that linger into the present or leave mysteries waiting to be solved and people to be rediscovered.”
Explore (and subscribe!) to Jamie’s substack at jamiebradburn.substack.com.