Borrower's Card: Lillooet Public Library

A couple of years ago I set out to write a series of poems about libraries: the public library in my town, the book swap that may or may not still operate in its very casual fashion on Mayne Island, BC, the little branch of the Buenos Aires public library system in the neighbourhood where I lived for a month one recent spring. But these poems just didn't turn out the way I had hoped, so a few months back I finally gave them up as un-editable and moved them into my Discards folder where they've been hanging out with all the work I did in university, set to auto-detonate the day I die. Then I started reading Kerry Clare's book blog, Pickle Me This, where she has a semi-regular feature she calls "Wild Libraries I Have Known." Perhaps, I thought, my little failures would be happier transposed into prose. I sent Kerry a note telling her of my plan. Libraries are for everyone, she said (more or less).

In the mid-eighties the Lillooet Public Library was housed an a one-storey building at the corner of Main Street and 8th Avenue. 8th Avenue is on an incline, so from inside the library, near the twirling paperback racks, you could see the sidewalk and the legs of pedestrians disappearing up the hill. My mother was one of the librarians and so my sisters and I spent a lot of time looking out the window, perusing the stacks, and in all the places other kids weren't allowed to be, like behind the giant check-out desk on the rolly chair using the date stamp, and in the glassed-in staff room behind it eating snacks.

The children's area was next as you came in, boxed in on two sides by higher shelving, with a colourful carpet and slant-topped tables with Richard Scarry, Robert Munsch, and the rest displayed. The book I remember best, though, was actually a Via Rail promotion of some sort, with photos of a girl, maybe early twenties, travelling across the country by train, getting off in Banff, then Winnipeg, and Montreal. I would love to find a copy of that book. It obviously had a lasting impact on my travel preferences. Good marketing, Via.

Speaking of trains, in the middle of the library was a large glass case where holiday-themed displays were housed. And one snowy day when I was maybe five or six my mum packed all the candy from the Christmas display into a bag and my dad and I got to take it on the train with us to Vancouver. (Kids, if your parents ever ask you for career advice, librarian is a really good pick. The perks for you will be endless.)

Toward the back of the adult section, near the large-print editions – which I always thought were intended for kids who were ready for adult fiction but not the drop in font size that went along with it – had been created a little sitting area with a couple of vinyl-covered armchairs and a reading lamp. I remember it as surprisingly civilized back there, and along with the fiction, I looked forward to the armchair and lamp that might go along with adulthood. Still waiting on the armchair.

Then, in the late eighties they moved our high school to a new building and transformed the old building into a rec centre. The library was relocated to this new complex, and it's never been quite the same for me.

PrairyErth

William Least Heat-Moon
Houghton Mifflin (1991)

I bought this on one of my last visits to The Odd Book in Wolfville, N.S., before moving to Halifax almost a year ago. The Odd Book is relatively small, but it's well organized and specific without being snobbish. There are dedicated Classics, archaeology and linguistics sections, for example, but also a wall of mass-market mysteries and a good stash of Archie comics. A friend of mine once said, before coming home for a summer while doing his Master's degree, that the only place in the Valley he wanted to work was The Odd Book and that if he couldn't work there he wasn't really sure what he was going to do. They weren't hiring. I'll have to check and see if he's over that yet.

On this visit I came to the cash with William Least Heat-Moon’s first book, Blue Highways, in my hand, and the store’s owner, Jim Tillotson, steered me toward PrairyErth on the new arrivals shelf. I read the first couple of chapters soon after, but was just too buried in the minutiae of moving into a new place and learning how to be a working person again – lunch-packing, for instance, eluded me for the first few weeks – and so I put the book aside. Then, after finishing The Great Railway Bazaar back before Christmas I found myself still in the mood for non-fiction but wanting something a bit more…stationary, and PrairyErth beamed from the shelf, looking fat and happy and entirely unscathed from its previous rejection.

The book is subtitled (a deep map) and that's exactly what it is. Heat-Moon went to Chase County, Kansas, a place where not much is thought to happen, and just inched his way through it, sometimes walking, sometimes rooting in courthouse records and the journals of those who settled or passed through, and sometimes waiting, in the grass or in a bar or in his van, to see what does happen. Some of his research has to do with particular routes through the county – railroads, secondary highways and paths. In one of my favourite sections he tries to uncover the Orient Line, a railway that was to have connected Kansas City and China, via Mexico, but that he begins to suspect may be no more than rumour.

Kansas is more or less the dead middle of the (contiguous) United States, and it's also where east becomes west, or vice versa. It's got the last large expanse of tallgrass prairie in the country, and one of the recurring elements in PrairyErth is the position of various people Heat-Moon interviews on the proposed Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve (which was successfully established a few years after the book's publication). It's a contentious issue for Kansans who still dream of a return to the days when a viable living could be made working prairie rangeland. In one chapter Heat-Moon recounts a conversation he has with essayist Wes Jackson in which Jackson outlines his vision for a new kind of agricultural community for a post-oil future, a model suited to the current economic reality in Chase County: relying and putting a greater value on human labour and keeping more of the products of that labour in the local area.

PrairyErth is of a piece with some of John McPhee's writing, in terms of the steady, on-the-ground chipping away at history, geology, ecology, economics, and ... I don't know, maybe happenstance, and the implied conviction that these need to be studied together. My one disappointment with it was that the parts I expected to like the most I actually liked least. These are where the author examines the effect of the prairie on his mindset. I travelled across Montana and North Dakota by train a couple of years ago and I guess had secretly hoped to find a closer articulation of my own experience of that landscape. The sentiments seem quite genuine, but the language he used often left me cold. Walking kept wandering into dreaming and into baggy statements about time. Given how much I like the rest of the book I'm tempted to say this is really a matter of vocabulary. Or a cultural divide, and I am just being ignorant.

Or maybe it's all the solitude. In the final chapter Heat-Moon and a friend, a fellow writer the (now) late Clive Scott Chisholm, embark on a multi-day walk to try to find the Kaw Trail, a path through the county, once travelled by the Wind People tribe when they were relegated to territory south of their original lands. Together the pair bounce ideas about the prairie off each other that to me are much more accurate and interesting than much of Heat-Moon's deeper solo musings. With Chisholm Heat-Moon has a sympathetic ear (Chisholm himself wrote a book about a long walk he did following the Mormon route from the Missouri River to the Great Salt Lake Valley) and someone to jog him out of the most earnest of his ruminations. There is a Tent Dwellers-like repartee here, both in terms of the wit and a particular brand of checked intuition. It was a good note to go out on, I thought.

Kay Ryan

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to try to memorize some poems I like. I don’t have a notion yet of whether this will necessarily improve my enjoyment of them, but I’m interested to see what the process will be like.

Although the obvious choices might be old favourites, I decided to make it all new with a new-to-me poet, American Kay Ryan. Like many, many other people, I had not heard of her before she took up her post as poet laureate (2008–2010). She’s stayed out of the mainstream – she lives in Marin County, California, and made a living teaching remedial English at the local college. When she was twenty-nine she took a cross-country cycling trip to try to decide whether or not to continue writing poetry. Somewhere in Colorado she posed herself the question “Do you like it?” and responded yes and then went from there. If you want to know more about her writing life, there’s a good interview with her here, from the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.

Her poems are about asking the right questions, too. What is this? I thought it was this, but instead it’s this. You thought it was this, but I think maybe it’s this. From The Best of It: New & Selected Poems (2010) I bookmarked six I liked best, on first read, and have decided to start the memorizing with "Easter Island." Once I've done that I have the ukulele and Spanish to learn, and more nuts and legumes to eat. Should be a busy year.

The Geography of Arrival

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction released its shortlist yesterday and I was pleased to see George Sipos's The Geography of Arrival (Gaspereau, 2010) on there. I had the pleasure of working with George on his manuscript a couple of years ago. The book is a memoir of his family's years in London, Ontario, following their immigration from Hungary in the late 1950s.

Here in Halifax we have a new outdoor skating oval, built for the upcoming Canada Games, and all over the city you can see people with their skates slung over their shoulders and hear the speculation as to whether the oval will be maintained following the Games. So in the spirit of skating here's a little bit of George's "Rink" chapter:

That fine counter-clockwise swirl always had an inherent flaw, however. Regardless of whether one went early or late, on a weekday or weekend, somewhere on the sheet of ice there was, inevitably, one gaping gouge. Often it was no more than a few inches long or a mere inch or so deep, but enough to catch the blade of a skate and send you sprawling. The secret, which the whole circling crowd (except the very little kids who spent most of their time on all fours anyway) understood, was to find out where the crack was on the first circuit and then avoid it. As we skated round and round, as the pucks whacked into the boards of the adjacent hockey rink, we all knew as one body where the flaw was, and the exact moment to swerve or to step lightly over it.

The winner of the prize will be announced on February 14.

Old Year/New Year

Since tidying it up a few days ago I've been really taken with this little corner of my office. (The rest of the room remains much less photogenic.) On the desk is one of my Christmas gifts, The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Look out, manuscripts. I've got a thousand+ pages of authority at my fingertips. And it's current.

I love making New Year's resolutions and I think this year I'll include building myself a better editorial/biblio resource library at home. Chicago, of course, will have a place of honour (maybe even a little stand). I'll also want to upgrade my house dictionary from my mum's 1954 Oxford Concise, sans spine, to the newest Oxford Canadian. And if the Dalhousie library system is determined to stick to its three renewal limit, I'm going to need the History of the Book in Canada set, which I mentioned last post but have made only a very small dent in since. Hmm. What else?

The Zs

I found out several months ago that it was possible to use my public library card at the university libraries in the province, and this weekend I finally wandered over to the Killam Library at Dalhousie University to fill out the necessary paperwork. Then I braved the hoards of Ugg boots and withering undergrad stares until I located my favourite section: the Zs – Bibliography and Library Science.

I was looking for the first volume of the mammoth The History of the Book in Canada, a major research project that (I think) wound up a few years ago and resulted in three large volumes of essays and an online database. I have been doing some very amateurish research into early book publishing in BC and a librarian acquaintance suggested I check this out. He also recommended Ocean Paper Stone by Robert Bringhurst (1984), and while I was in the neighbourhood I found Influences on California Printing by James D. Hart and Ward Ritchie (1970). I mentioned Ward Ritchie in another post, as a printer I'd been interested in. The whole California printing and publishing scene fascinates me, as it seems to be, or at one time have been, surrounded by a fairly vibrant community of librarians (including Lawrence Clark Powell) and enthusiast societies who held talks and published various ephemeral items of their own.

Three more days at the office and then I can dig into all my new finds (and the baking and the brie and the antipasto).

Winter Survival

I’ve mentioned before my love of travel literature (on the nightstand right now is Paul Theroux’s first railway saga The Great Railway Bazaar). My other escape genre is the DIY/cheap living/how-I-dropped-out-of-society-and-lived-to-love-it treatise. Although book editing is a pretty good gig, Christmas and winter both make me especially susceptible to the gospel of simple, jobless living. I thought I’d share a few titles that I have not yet read but that will likely be in this winter’s lineup, in case you want to read along.



First is Possum Living by Dolly Freed, which was published in 1978 when the author was in her late teens. Her father quit his job and pulled her out of high school, and the book is her story of how they got by on little to no money and what she did with all the time she had to self-educate. It has experienced a recent resurgence with a new edition released by Tin House Books in Portland, Oregon, last year. Dolly also has a blog, which I see is on hiatus now but has included some interesting reflections on her old life.



Second is Novella Carpenter’s Farm City, published last year. I read a review and then devoured every last post on her blog and have still not got around to buying the book – I intend to remedy that soon. For the past several years Carpenter has squatted an empty lot in Oakland, California, raising goats and chickens, gardening, and hosting classes on such things. She is ambitious but also very frank about her failures. She also makes no bones about enjoying life in the city and is not a purist back-to-the-lander in that regard, which I find quite refreshing. She’s a journalist, too, and has interviewed some like-minded people, including…



...Philip Garlington, whose book Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead (2003) has been out of print for a few years and goes for about $60 on Abe. Garlington was also a journalist who, back in the 1980s, quit his job and moved onto a $300 piece of Nevada desert. He doesn’t actually recommend the lifestyle, but it combines two of my favourites, deserts and dropping out, so I can’t resist.

In the meantime, presents need wrapping and the job needs going to.