November-December 2022
The familiar can be like a mine that we consider played out – we think we’ve already retrieved everything of value from it, and though still present in our awareness, it’s relegated to the background, overgrown and neglected. But then we revisit it for some reason, perhaps armed with new knowledge or a new need, and discover untapped value that we could not previously access, or a new way of looking at it (like old salt mines now used for storage).
As I prepared this issue, revisiting the familiar emerged as the theme. Various lenses provided that new eye: chronological distance, revisiting my two-decades-ago self; bringing new knowledge to bear on a poem last read long ago; experiencing the geography that shaped a beloved body of work; reading the actual source of a cultural touchpoint; and learning the secret behind a metaphor recently used. Each one enriched my understanding and appreciation of something I thought I knew.
The Tidbit
I discovered a fascinating and rather metaphorical tidbit when I came across a TV documentary about the origin of the game Jenga (where you make a tower of wooden blocks and try to remove individual blocks to put them on top without collapsing the whole thing). The game only works, it turns out, if the blocks are imperfect. If all of the blocks were perfect, they would fit snugly together and you couldn’t slide them out. When Jenga games are manufactured, they actually tumble the blocks all together so that they get random imperfections. It's a nice little metaphor for many aspects of life – perfection can be sterile, it’s the random imperfections that create the openings that keep things moving. As Leonard Cohen sang, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
I came across the documentary while channel-hopping (another example of randomness opening up possibilities) and twigged to it because I had myself recently used Jenga as a metaphor, though for something quite different. Over many years, I’ve noticed an unspoken but frequent management approach in which an organization’s basic but unglamorous tasks and personnel are cannibalized in order to add new, more high-profile programs and more prestigious personnel at the top. The organization gets worse and worse at its core functions, and perhaps eventually collapses (here’s an example from higher education). It’s just like a game of Jenga, in other words, and I wrote on Spacing about how the City of Toronto is following this perverse Jenga school of management.
What’s Up
Some things feel tediously over-familiar, but even they can provide surprises. “In Flanders Fields” is undoubtedly the most shopworn of all Canadian poems. We think we know it, and perhaps roll our eyes when it’s trotted out. But a few years ago, I read the whole (very short) poem again, and was startled to realize it took the form of a French medieval poem, the rondeau. I’d come across the rondeau in my historical work on French provincial poets, and was always fascinated by its intricacy. I realized I must have never actually read the full “In Flanders Fields” since it was foisted on us in high school, before I had learned about this kind of poem in my graduate studies.
Why was this twentieth century Canadian poem in the form of French medieval verse? This year, I persuaded the Literary Review of Canada to let me investigate, and with the help of my friend and French literature expert Mario Longtin and a PhD thesis I found online, I was able to unravel the story – and in the process learn more about the poem, its poet, and one of my favourite verse forms.
Read “An Old Refrain: The medic who went around in circles” (I thought the LRC came up with a clever title).
But looking at the poem with a new eye also gave me a much greater appreciation for it. It’s quite a powerful and well-crafted rondeau (they are often rather artificial). The poet, John McCrae, wrote a lot of other verse before and after, but while competent, none of it is memorable. I feel like this is an example of someone with talent, rather than genius, having all their efforts culminate in one piece of greatness. McCrae had written rondeau before, and often wrote about death, faith, loss, and war. He was a man of erudition and great feeling. But his other poems tended to be overly high-flown in their rhetoric and simple in their meaning. “In Flanders Fields,” by contrast, is simple in language yet packs a lot into its few verses. I think that the circumstances of writing it – overnight in a dugout, in the midst of battle, after a friend’s funeral – combined with the shortness and structure of the rondeau to make him uncharacteristically direct. What he might have thought insufficiently elevated – some of the stories of its writing have him throwing it out at first – actually turned out to be more accessible and timeless. The seemingly unpolished was what enabled a connection to a wider audience.
Quotable
"All these editor blokes, as I understand, get pretty careworn after they've been at the job for a while. ... Today he looked more editorial than ever, so ... I endeavoured to cheer him up by telling him how much I had enjoyed his last issue. As a matter of fact, I hadn't read it."
- P.G. Wodehouse, "The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy"
P.G. Wodehouse was for a long time, for me, an example of the familiar and yet unread. His Wooster and Jeeves characters are part of the culture, especially true when I lived in England. I knew their characters and roles, but I had never actually read the stories until Molly picked up one of the books in a little free library. Certainly entertaining, but this quotation in particular spoke to me, after having embarked on a freelance editorial career while also serving as editor of Spacing. I have definitely “looked editorial” at times! And I’ve experienced that form of cheering up (I encourage everyone to get a subscription to Spacing so you can cheer me up genuinely when I look too “editorial”).
But the timing was also particularly good because I had just read Oliver Bullough’s book Butler to the World, which scathingly compares the United Kingdom, and its many dependencies, to Jeeves – always getting the undeserving wealthy out of trouble. In the real world, Britain does it through lax regulation, tax evasion, and ethically dubious financial and legal services. I’d often noticed that many of the world’s tax havens are actually remnants of the British Empire that benefit from leftover special jurisdictions. Bullough argues that, when Britain lost its empire and stopped being the centre of the financial world, it turned to servicing the world’s wealthy and corrupt to compensate. Different in degree, but not entirely in kind, from extricating a foolish aristocrat from minor social pickles.
Pic Pick
You can love someone’s work, but then appreciate it to a whole new level when you actually visit and experience the place where they lived and created. I remember, after moving to England for grad school, suddenly understanding gothic novels at a whole new level as the lashing rain and whipping winds of winter storms rattled my ancient windows; and, subsequently, the English poets’ love of spring as it extended its magic from late February to the end of June (as opposed to the springs I grew up with in Ottawa, which lasted basically two weeks between winter and summer).
I learned to love Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings in a class on the Romantic movement in undergrad (I didn’t realize how fortunate I was – the course was my favourite of my entire degree, and I was surprised it was never repeated – I didn’t understand what adjuncts were at the time, they were rarer back then). I’ve zealously viewed the originals wherever I could (the Russians were some of the few to really appreciate his melancholy yearning, so there’s a bunch in the Hermitage). But on a recent trip to Germany, Molly and I took a trip to Mecklenburg-Pomerania and Rügen Island, on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where he was born and raised, and later often visited. It took my understanding of his work to a whole new level. The soft maritime light, the evocative sea, the mystical forests, and wild cliff faces explained so much of his sensibility.
The Catch-Up
This catch-up goes way back. In 1997, when the internet first started taking off and old media was still dominant, I started what was effectively a blog avant la lettre, entirely coded by hand and uploaded via FTP (so old school!) to the web space provided by my internet provider. It commented on Canadian public affairs and media, so I called it “Canadian Commentary,” and it even got featured in the Toronto Star (my first ever media appearance, I think). I kept adding to it for several years, but I never got around to focusing on it enough to evolve it into something more. Once Spacing got going and took up my writing energies in the early 2000s, I wrapped it up.
I did leave it online, though, for anyone who happened to come across it (it has one of those old-fashioned click counters – which still works!). However, my internet provider has just informed me that they are shutting down their legacy customer web spaces on February 1. So this is your last chance to read what I was thinking two decades ago.
It’s fascinating to go back and see what I was writing. Some of what I wrote is still relevant – I still like my campaign finance proposal, which I think remains better than anything out there. Some of the ideas I proposed (e.g. net-metering of electricity) have long since been implemented. Some (e.g. individual day care allowances) that I thought were radical at the time are now actually conservative policies. Some issues that were big (e.g. debt relief for developing nations) have largely fallen off the radar (although still needed). In many cases, the policy discussion has long moved on.
It was a time before there was any real trolling (I got a couple of argumentative emails, but nothing much), and it felt easy to throw ideas out there and see if anyone noticed. Without social media, it was harder to get the word out, yet I did manage (Yahoo!’s old categorized search helped), and frankly, amid all the noise it’s hard to get attention these days too. The site may be obsolete now both technologically and in terms of policy, but it’s fun to revisit my younger self brimming with ideas and occasionally rousing rhetoric.
Check out Canadian Commentary (last chance!)