The Star Thrower

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war. . . Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong. . . Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings. . .

In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.

“It’s still alive,” I ventured.

“Yes,” he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sunk in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.

…”There are not many who come this far,” I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. “Do you collect?”

“Only like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. “And only for the living.”

He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.

“The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”

The Star Thrower is part of a sixteen page essay of the same name by Loren Eiseley (1907–1977). It was published in 1969 in The Unexpected Universe. The Star Thrower is also the title of a 1978 anthology of Eiseley’s works (including the essay) which he completed shortly before his death.

Loren Eiseley has been described as the 20th century’s answer to Henry David Thoreau. He writes in a thought-provoking, almost mystical style. He is a naturalist, poet, realist, existentialist, haunted mystic, evolutionary anthropologist, environmental advocate, historian, and human being.

This book is an anthology of his best work, selected from several past publications including some of his poetry. His reflections on humankind, time, evolution, the Earth, the natural world, the unknown, and even the very nature of existence itself are more powerful than the most dense scientific formulae or the most sacred tomes of Scripture. He looks at our mysterious universe with the eyes of a human being, and he looks at his own soul in the process… This is not the work of a theologian or a secularist; these are the stories of a complex human being who admits that there is far more in heaven and earth than we dream.

Review excerpted from Amazon.

Hotel of the Saints

A dying dog, a pair of doves, blindness and an old hotel feature in eleven deceptively light tales of isolation in Ursula Hegi’s Hotel of the Saints, a collection that spans about twelve years of Hegi’s short fiction. These are stories of ordinary people leading lives of quiet desperation, estranged from society, from relatives, sometimes from themselves,. They are left to forge an uneasy peace with a sorrow-tinged existence.

In the title piece, Lenny, a seminary student trying to find his faith, helps his frail and incapable Aunt Jocelyn overhaul her newly inherited Hotel of the Saints after the death of her husband. The old hotel rooms come alive as sunny Mediterranean colours and whimsical themes replace the drab greyness, and Aunt Jocelyn and Lenny are transformed.

It always comes back to sitting alone at a desk,” she said. “I do between 50 and 100 revisions. So the way I used to write is the way I still write.

In The Juggler, a mother tries to protect her daughter from marrying a man who is going blind. The mother’s anxiety about her child quickly leads to conflict about the nature of their relationship and what it means to rely on another too much.

I do it to really go very deeply into the characters to understand the characters, to explore the characters. And a lot has to do with language. I write fiction as if I were writing poetry.

In one of the briefest but most powerful stories, titled The End of All Sadness, Hegi gives voice to an abused woman who finds a place of peace amid a life of violence. A single mother brings home a man who’s been sleeping on the ground by the pond. She marries him after he hits her for smiling at the postman. In her strange euphoria, she has no space even for her daughter.

After I’ve written a story, after I’ve gone through it 50 or 100 times, each time I feel those feelings. I go through that experience with the character. And after I have finished the story, on an emotional level, it has become my experience, and I am altered.

In Doves, a quiet, lonely single woman finds herself in a country bar. “A lean-hipped man asks her to dance, and as she sways in his arms on the floor that’s spun of sawdust and boot prints, she becomes the woman in every song that the men on the platform sing: the woman who leaves them; the woman who keeps breaking their hearts.”

The woman with the dying dog in Lower Crossing comes to realize that she keeps herself busy with trips to the local cafe, work in her plant shop, living with her middle-aged sister, and occasionally picking up men at the hardware store, as a way of coping with the loss of her best friend.

Ursula Hegi is the author of five novels: Intrusions (Viking Press, 1981), Floating In My Mother’s Palm (Poseidon Press/ Simon and Schuster, 1995), Stones from the River (Poseidon Press/ Simon and Schuster, 1995), Salt Dancers (Simon and Schuster, 2001), and The Vision of Emma Blau (Simon and Schuster, 2001). She has also published nonfiction, as well as two collections of stories, Unearned Pleasures (Scribner Paperback, 1995) and Hotel of the Saints, (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Saving Dying Languages

The clock on the kitchen wall at the Moraviantown Reserve seniors’ centre loudly clicks away the seconds as Velma Noah waits to see if any of the few remaining speakers of a vanishing language can remember the word for “beet.”

Five elderly women and a man stare ahead of them, silently searching for a word they may not have heard since they were children, when nearly everyone on this small reserve could speak the language. Ms. Noah frets the cover of an English-Delaware dictionary, which might hold a clue. But if the word for beet isn’t in the book and she can’t tease it out of the minds of the three women most likely to know, one more piece of the language could be gone forever.

Alma Burgoon is 80; Retta Huff, 86; and her cousin Mattie Huff, 90. Along with one or two other elderly women on the reserve, “they’re the last known speakers. They’re all over the age of 70,” says Ms. Noah, 36-year-old mother of four.

Suddenly there’s chuckling around the folding table as someone remembers: maxkeetkweek.

Europeans gave this language the name Delaware (or Munsee Delaware), but its advocates today are taking back the name Lunaape (or Lenape). Its once-large territory has been reduced to a rump at Munsee-Delaware Nation — also known as Moraviantown — a reserve near London, Ont., with a population of about 200.

Like dozens of First Nations languages across the country, Lunaape is in danger of disappearing within a matter of years. Canada’s indigenous languages are in a state of crisis. Unless the knowledge is transferred to a new generation, dozens of traditional tongues will breathe their last.

Only a handful of indigenous languages — principally Inuktitut, Ojibway and various dialects of Cree — can be expected to survive without active intervention, according to linguistics experts.

There is no specific point at which a language officially becomes endangered. “The way that linguists usually look at it is to take into consideration the normal course of language transmission,” says John O’Meara, a linguist at Lakehead University who has studied Lunaape since 1979. “By that I mean languages are passed on from one generation to the next. If at some point that process of transmission is broken, then you can deduce that the language isn’t going to be spoken by younger people in the future.”

Lunaape is on the list of nearly extinct languages as “Munsee.” British Columbia figures prominently, as the home of Bella Coola (20 speakers left by last count in 2002), Haida (55), Kutenai (12), Sechelt (40) and seven others. The Yukon tongue of Tagish is a heartbeat away from vanishing: Lucy Wren, the last native speaker, is in her 90s and there is sparse interest from the community in reviving the language.”

Native languages have declined because of economic and social pressure to speak English and French. Language activists also blame assimilationist education policies; children sent to residential schools were often punished for speaking the languages they had learned at home.

“What happens, then, when you begin to devalue the languages?” asks Keren Rice, a linguistics professor at the University of Toronto, and director of its Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives. “People didn’t speak them to their children because they didn’t want their children to have the hard time that they had.”

Should a full language revival prove unworkable in some communities, experts like Prof. Poser suggest there are other ways of bringing about a linguistic comeback.

“We can certainly imagine a situation in which children learn native languages in school as written languages, together with much cultural information, just as European children not very long ago learned Latin, or as many Jews still learn Hebrew.”

For Ms. Noah, who spends a couple days each week rounding up most of what’s left of her community’s Lunaape speakers so she can practice the language, reviving Lunaape isn’t simply a matter of remembering vocabulary and syntax; it is a mission to restore traditional culture, and thus identity. Without it, she says, Moraviantown will continue to struggle with problems like drug addiction and high secondary school dropout rates.

“It’s not the social workers that’ll help, it’s the language. If you know your language, you know who you are,” she says.

Excerpted from: Adam McDowell, National Post, January 24, 2009.

Stupeur et Tremblements

Japan beckons, alluring and elusive; foreigners pay court, but their attentions often remain unrequited. The relationship between Japan and the foreign suitor — a dance of seduction, misunderstanding and rejection — has inspired its own literary subgenre.

In Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et Tremblements (Fear and Trembling), the protagonist is excluded because she are foreign and typecast because she is a woman. The novel offers a grim, sometimes mordantly funny, vision of a Japan that seems determined to keep outsiders outside — where they belong.

When well-meaning but all too often obtuse Westerners bump up against Japanese standards, the comedy in this novel — and its underlying sadness — emerges. Stupeur et Tremblements takes place at the headquarters of a Japanese corporation in Tokyo.

Elegantly written (as translated from the French by Adriana Hunter) and now — elegantly filmed — it is a chronicle of the startlingly rapid fall of a young Belgian who tries to find a place in a Japanese company. Amélie, the heroine, is a child of foreign diplomats who spent her early years in Japan and so is fluent in Japanese. But it is soon clear that she is hapless when it comes to translating what isn’t said.

She fails her first test: understanding a lesson in humility that her boss tries to teach her by repeatedly tearing up an assignment without telling her what she’s done wrong. Amélie stumbles again when she takes the initiative by performing a task that hasn’t been assigned to her. Yet her fatal error is more deeply personal: failing to understand the psychology of the beautiful, brilliant and underappreciated Fubuki Mori, the woman who is her immediate superior. Amélie senses Fubuki’s desperate wish to be married — achieving a status that would free her from the tyranny of the company but confine her in a different sphere.

Amélie doesn’t see that her own success may be a threat to a woman who has labored for years to attain what little status she has in a country where women are often denied opportunities for promotion. And then she makes the classic Western mistake of attempting to talk over a problem with Fubuki rather than finding unspoken ways to make amends. Matters become even more complicated after she clumsily tries to offer sympathy when Fubuki is rebuked by her own boss. By witnessing Fubuki’s humiliation, Amélie has shamed her, and Fubuki proceeds to exact her revenge.

Nothomb (herself the daughter of Belgian diplomats who served in Japan) demonstrates a shrewd understanding of the intricate ways Japanese relationships are made and spoiled. And she has the classic Japanese corporation dead to rights, sketching out the often mindless and capricious hierarchy, the dangers of spontaneity and the condescending superiority with which many Japanese regard Westerners. While at times the level of cruelty in her novel approaches caricature, Nothomb also has compassion for those Japanese who are imprisoned in this system.

At times, Stupeur et Tremblements may seem unduly bleak, and they offer only glimpses of the kindness and decency of those Japanese who do open their hearts to foreigners. Yet each book captures a truth that the foreign suitor might use to find some degree of peace: loving without blinders means accepting the inevitability of distance.

Excerpted from: Susan Chira, Lost in Translation, New York Times, March 25, 2001.

Mirvish Books Leaves the Village

David Mirvish Books is closing its doors after more than three decades as one of Toronto’s premier spots for art, design and photography books.

The bookstore has been stitched into the fabric of the Bloor and Markham Sts. area since 1974. David Mirvish opened the store as a part of the Mirvish Gallery, which showcased the work of colour field sculptors, painters and abstract artists.  In the heart of one of Toronto’s Victorian-style neighbourhoods, the establishment became a landmark in the Mirvish Village.

Store manager Eleanor Johnston said the doors will close Feb. 28.

“We are moving all of the inventory online. We’re not going to be like Amazon, that just lists everything. We will only list things that we have. It’s just another part of the world of selling retail. This is the transition that we’re taking. We’re not doing it with an aim of saying this is a better business concept.”

Frances Wood, the co-owner of Southern Accent, a restaurant across from the bookstore, said losing the 34-year-old establishment will change the face of the Village forever.

Mirvish Books is not the first independent bookstore to close in the area recently. Ballenford Books, specializing in books on architecture, on Markham St. just two doors away from Mirvish, closed last year after 29 years.

Mirvish’s closing has left some customers asking what will happen to the 50-foot-long painting by Frank Stella that dominates the store’s interior. “We don’t have any plans to do anything with it,” said Johnston.

For customers like Tracy Dalglish, who has been coming to the store since it opened, losing the building will end the romantic experience of visiting the store.  Dalglish remembers visiting with her father as a 13-year-old in the late ’70s.

“I would come down with my dad for the Boxing Day sales,” she said about her trips from Rosedale to the store. “I found my love of books in this store with my dad. It’s sad when you see places you love disappear.”

Susan Warner Keene was a curious student in her mid 20s at the Ontario College of Art when she discovered the store in 1974. She has been coming ever since. She said it was the most beautiful physical space any bookstore in Toronto had to offer back then. She finds inspiration for her work with hand papermaking from reading a variety of books the store offers.

“I’ve found books here that have been tremendously helpful in my own work,” she said at the store yesterday. 

“It’s probably my favourite bookstore, so it will be very sad to lose it.”

Praise Song for the Day

Praise Song for the Day
written and recited
by Elizabeth Alexander
at Obama’s inauguration

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Elizabeth Alexander’s poem to celebrate the inauguration of President Barack Obama will be published as a commemorative book by Graywolf Press on Feb. 6. Alexander, who teaches at Yale University, read the poem immediately after Obama’s inaugural address Tuesday. The book will be titled “Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration.” Alexander is the fourth poet to compose a special poem for an inauguration, following Robert Frost, for John F. Kennedy, and Maya Angelou and Miller Williams, for Bill Clinton.

Obama Inaugural Address Word Cloud

More inaugural word clouds at Toronto Star

Revolutionary Type: Ecofont

In the midst of all the printing companies offering recycled paper, vegetable-based inks and e-waste management, one firm in the Netherlands is backing up for a second and asking consumers to consider switching to a greener font.

Yes, we’re talking about the carbon footprint of Times New Roman, Helvetica and Gil Sans. But don’t roll your eyes just yet. Although it may seem silly, the new Ecofont, created by SPRANQ, could have major sustainable ripple effects and potentially kick-start a different approach to how we design typefaces, and why.

For instance, rather than ask a questions such as, “What makes a font look good?” this Dutch design team asked, “How much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability?”

The answer, deduced after many trial runs and much coffee: 20%.

“We started off looking at Verdana, the most-used font in Holland,” says SPRANQ co-founder Gerjon Zomer of the creative process behind Ecofont. The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

The team then deleted thin vertical strips within each letter to produce as much negative space as possible – doing this saved about 50% of the ink but also left them with a font that was unreadable on most computer screens. They tried cutting out a series of square shapes and even stars, but in the end, circles proved most effective.

Finally, the designers switched from Verdana to Vera, and declared they had a winner. It’s now available for free downloading at Ecofont.eu.

“I think the power of Ecofont is its simplicity,” says Zomer. “There are a lot of complicated technical solutions out there to save ink, but they don’t usually appeal to people. We decided it was important to see the effect, right there in front of you.”

Some environmentalists argue that if renewable vegetable- or soy-based inks are used, it hardly matters how much is printed.

“But those still require cartridges,” Zomer says, “which need replacing, and each cartridge can require up to three and a half litres of oil to ­manufacture.”

Another advantage to the Ecofont is that it’s free.

“We found that most things to do with the environment right now are still very money-related,” Zomer says. “If a business is going green, it’s usually just for publicity’s sake and for customer reassurance. If the cost is too high, it won’t be successful.”

Reaction to the Ecofont, which unfortunately isn’t refined enough yet for book publishing or other high-end printing projects, has been mixed.

For whatever reason, North Americans tend to embrace it, but the European community has been more cynical, claiming it’s nothing but a cheeky marketing ploy.

Writers at Treehugger.com, for example, gave it a test-run and had mostly positive results, but they also point out that one could simply adjust the printer settings – think options such as low-resolution, fast draft mode or grey-scale.

Meanwhile, in a Jan. 2 National Public Radio broadcast in the United States, the host quipped, “We’re doing something similar here in our offices – our printers no longer use vowels.”

Still, despite all the criticism, there’s something to be said for green initiatives taking hold in unexpected places. The Ecofont proves that a seemingly inconsequential, small white dot on the stem of a 6-pt letter F can have a positive effect on the earth, one that’s hard to measure in quantitative terms but that perhaps signifies something greater.

And a small leap forward is always better than standing around doing nothing, so at the very least, the Dutch deserve a pat on the back for tackling the green movement in a unique way, choosing to think small in a world of big problems.

Source: National Post, January 15, 2009.