When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking

I've always had a natural mistrust of the letter e. It was the egg, Humpty Dumpty, who fell off the wall, yolk and albumen spilling viscously. In high school, I adopted the Greek epsilon, ε, and have scrawled it ever since.

e is a very tricky letter, I tell my young students. It's like the e of flea, and jumps clean over consonants and makes innocent vowels sitting there wake up and say their names. a becomes æ. At becomes ate. It's good, that letter e, but it can't jump over two or three consonants, so 'settle' remains 'settled.' And if e is next to c, watch out: e gets a crush, we could say. Then c gets stars in her eyes and forgets to be a 'k' and becomes a sinuous 's.' How do you read 'receives'? Of course, when two vowels go walking, one becomes shy, perhaps bashful, while the other proclaims its name.

Sometimes my young students can't read 'boat' or 'rain' or 'real' and so we jump up and walk around the room holding hands and I say, "We're a boat! I'll be a bashful 'a'; you be a courageous 'o' and say your name!" Are they puzzled? Maybe at first; then the laughter; then they start thinking up words we can play. If a parent looks in, I say, "It's okay! We're vowels marching around the dining room table!" They smile and withdraw politely.

Never mind the exceptions, I say - that's why we have memories: to memorize the exceptions!

I teach phonetically with flash cards that we make together as we travel into the wondrous land of reading. I teach differently to the regular school system of expecting children to 'pick up' reading from a reading-rich environment. Often my students simply memorize stories that have been read to them and are unable to recognize words out of that context. Teaching them phonetically gives them a way in to reading anything anytime. When my little students get tired or on 'overload' before our weekly hour is up, I'll switch roles: "Okay, time for you to teach me!" And I read so badly and make so many mistakes, but all so earnestly, they're laughing almost too hard to correct me, but correct me they do, my beautiful little charges.

My only motive, afterall, is to set them on a path of delight in the craziness of leaping e's, and vowel pairs who are friends, one out-going and one shy, ou's that are yowling, and the super shy silent h's that follow all the w's of every question word, as I hopefully open the world that a love of reading provides.

__________________________
(This little piece shows the barest surface of a phonetic-based reading system. And, yeah, their marks usually rise about 2 grade points; if they were getting D's, after a couple of months of the crazy Tuesday Tutor, we could expect B's; meaning, yeah, it's not just fun but they also learn actual reading skills that they get to keep after Ms. Tutor's a phonetically dim memory...)

Letter from a restaurant

Monsieur, the day is over, I worked at the investment bank, bought a sweater, walked city blocks until too hungry to continue. I am sitting in a corner of a Parsee Restaurant that drew me with an unusual warmth in its Indian colours and curtained light writing to you.

I sit at a small table covered with clear plastic under which a string tablecloth, woven in a loose stitch with an orange central flower radiating out in a circular pattern that stands out from the white stitching, lies. Lifting the glass stopper on a bottle of olive oil, I pour a delicate gold stream over my mostly lettuce salad, and then, from the other bottle, fresh lime juice. When the glass of housewine arrives, it is slightly vinegary, and I wonder if they bottled it themselves. The beef Keba is tender, the white rice is intermixed with yellow orange grains cooked with saffron. On the edge of the oval dish is a stewed tomatoe.

The patrons consist of an older retired couple, two young men in suits talking about business, and two Indian families who sit at tables pulled together. My favourites are a girl and boy, both perhaps 18 months old, whose words consist of 'blaaah...' and 'ma-ma-ma.' I think they are told they are too noisy for the woman in the corner because I am pointed at and they both suddenly turn and look at me with wide brown eyes. I smile, they smile, and then they run around the tables until their mothers grab them and put them in the high chairs. The women each have long shiny dark hair and are young and beautiful and are dressed in new sweats, unlike their husbands in their starch white shirts and office trousers. Throughout the meal, they continue to expend energy tying to quieten the children while their husbands talk. I think of an always-smiling young Parsee woman I met at a job recently and her wedding that week in a dress of white lace; afterwards, she said, she was changing into a mustard honey sari with gold threads sewn through it, the colours of the table cloth and the fragrant rice before me. I wonder about the Parsees in India; my young soon-to-be married friend originally from Sri Lanka, and if the life ahead of her will be similar to the families seated near me.

The young children cannot sit still in silence. I ruminate on what I am observing, mon cher. Why do we feel we have to contain energies that are different to our own? Why do we need to bring others down to our level? Why do we try to silence each other in the ways that we do?

These are questions that are haunting me, as you know, Monsieur.

I watch the fathers' irritation with the noisy children; the mothers' attempts to stop them from crying. What is this process of containing that begins so young?

The waiter, who can barely keep up with the orders, and runs from table to table, and the man behind the counter, who is also the cook, look like brothers. They have just opened this restaurant, on borrowed money perhaps. Business is already going well.

Inflamed

The poem I wrote disappeared. Usually I copy what I've written before posting, but the inflamed belly - perhaps it was the prunes and dried apricots, dark chocolate discs, Guinness draft, muesli and raw sugar, all fermenting until my stomach swelled in pain not unlike the labour of birth - and the late hour, I clicked on the wrong button, it disappeared. Poems can't be rewritten, not like prose can. I'm left wondering if what surfaced from the currents of words will reappear, or, if like a melted iceberg, it's gone, become ocean.

I wanted to post the poem, not talk about the bad night, and enjoy my quiet weekend making my way out into the day today, but I'm aching, light-headed, still swimming in the depths of the emotional disaster last week, the emailing, the words, the decisions, the silences, the loss.

Incomprehensible on the edge of.

Aren't they all edges?

And where is.

A Blog Recommendation

John Baker recently interviewed a writer who I admire a great deal, and who has become a personal friend: Five Questions: The Narrator.

Ira Socol, whose work I've been reading for over two years now, is one of the best writers I've found who is posting on the NET. Stylistically, his work is nearly perfect and continually astounds me. He manages, through action, memory, description to convey complex situations and characters. One doesn't get a sense of judgment of the characters in these often complex situations by the narrator of the piece, nor any of the self-aggrandizing or moralizing that is rife in the blogosphere, only compassion. He writes perhaps a kind of 'film noir' prose and his writing, without a word of excess, seems always to overflow into poetry. Despite posting rough drafts for a book, his posts are encapsulated and complete in themselves - knowing the broader sweep helps, but it's not necessary.

While it is wonderful of him to include my blog among his 'most read,' his site is one of the best in the blogosphere and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Writings of 'Who'

Since this poem is with a publisher, I have encrypted it in the same place where I posted it so that the comments are left intact and I can find it again if the need arises (Blogger is a fantastic easily searchable archive).

Show encrypted text

Fellini's "La Dolce Vita"

The only man, un autore, who speaks of love in the film shoots those he loves most at close range, his children behind white billowing diaphanous curtains, then, seated in his black leather armchair, in his black suit, himself.

We should learn to love each other so much we live outside time ... detached.

He said (Steiner). La Dolce Vita (1960).

Who can love in a world where money must be made? The film is from a man's perspective. It is the women who talk of love; if love is spoken of. Especially Marcello's fierce, suicidal and beautiful girlfriend for whom love is possessive.

Those whose lives overflow with money don't know what to do with love either. Fellini knows this. Love wants to hold, to keep forever in its embrace, but it's all feathers. The clouds of pillows become unstuffed. We are tarred with our desires. What we are searching for are endings.

(Or so Fellini implies, not I.)


(from a mss-in-progress)

Andy Warhol / Supernova

Warhol set up a continuous camera at an old, large, lumpy, dark cloth Couch in his Factory studio - people ate on it, talked, gyrated nakedly, made love, fixed motorcycles. They knew they were being filmed but the unblinking eye watching them became unfetishized, ordinary. They played to it, but without response, so they became outrageous before it. It recorded them in black and white in the frame. And now Gallery goers can watch a group, dated in the late '50s/early 60s, slowly peeling and eating bananas with a pronounced sexual tone, a nude woman, whose large breasts are particularly caught by the lighting, gyrating unendingly trying to seduce a man who's more interested in polishing his motorcycle, two men lost in a naked embrace, one lying lengthwise on top of the other, humping for hours while others move obliviously around them, the motorcycle guy, a cleaner.

The eye that doesn't weep, the unblinking eye is a dangerous eye. Warhol made it art, though, and so gave it an entrance into the pathos of living, and thus an ethos. The unblinking eye doesn't have an ethic. Perhaps only the eye that weeps does. And do we find ourselves weeping before the accident victims who he emblazoned from newspaper images into wall-sized silkscreen repetitive images that fade out? Who are these anonymous dead people, are they the future of us?

The film of the man sleeping was nearly unbearable. It was Edgar Allen Poe's tell-tale heart, beating. The camera is angled on his chest and part of his face. We see his diaphragm move up and down with his breath, which is not always even, depending on his inner state, his dreams, and we see his chest pounding with his heart beat. That heart beat eventually pounds in our ears. It is visceral, the core of the pulse, the central ventricle, where the blood gushes in and out of, hundreds of litres an hour. We find ourselves dreaming with the man who's sleeping and whose heart we witness beneath his chest with the black hairs that we can almost feel under our fingertips. We become voyeurs, watching the minutiae of the vulnerability of sleep.

Warhol was a voyeur, no doubt about it. He chose moments in the continuum of images to still, to repeat spatially. Moments that compose us in a moment in time, a moment in history.

If I seek to integrate the critic with the poet, Warhol did not help in that quest. When we arrived, my friend and I, we were given a large black phone with numbers to press. Then we heard recordings, Cronenburg, actors, critics, memories of those who knew him, visited his studio, were part of his crowd or had a portrait done by him. The rooms at the AGO devoted to the show held people standing before large silkscreens or screens of moving images with a big black phone to their ears. It was eery. We were in a wired world that he perhaps prophesied. But we could not fully 'read' Warhol without the 'critical' accompaniment.

Warhol impartially recorded the effects of passion: the most wanted criminals; photographs of horrendous accidents, suicides; and sex, a man's face only while he receives a blow job; and the terror of narcissism as the 3 minute film records an unmoving, unblinking subject who dissembles before it, showing the stark soul in the unwavering eyes and the retreat into blinking, self-consciousness, an attempt to veil while being instructed not to before the artist left the room. As he impartially took snap-shots in the recording of us, in stance perhaps like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, 'paring his fingernails,' Warhol was, for me, cerebral. You cannot view his work without knowledge of its background, what he was doing, how it came about, what it means, its critical context; without this information, you are lost. Everything is a 'found image.' Nothing is original. It is the unblinking eye, a constant surveillance, even if Warhol's "eye" is a configured eye and pointed like a spotlight. His work is a comment on culture, almost a footnote on it, and we need to be guided through the specifics of that culture was before we can begin to understand it. Warhol has not become fetishized by our culture, become a cliche, though shows like this may help, as well as productions like the 4-hour PBS documentary, to the point where we fully understand the message of his medium without explanation.

tags: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disaster, 1962-1964, Art Gallery of Ontario.