Summer in Vancouver’s a life spent outdoors. For most of June we’ve had perfect weather, and as I begin to write this monthly post solstice has just passed. Even if I wake at five in the morning the sky is well on the way to being light. Sunset’s officially around nine thirty, but the light lingers until after ten. In the West End, the tree canopy is now fully grown, and there’s that deep contrast between light and shade and even temperature as you move into the shelter of the trees. The linden tree outside our balcony has flowered, and its lime green blossoms are full of tiny bees. The wings that will carry the seeds in spirals have already formed above the clusters of tiny petals, and the air carries that faint citrus-favoured scent that always makes me wonder if that’s why lindens are sometimes called lime trees. Cafes in nearby streets are packed, and the sea wall clogged with bicycles. To this summer mood this year we’ve also added the FIFA World Cup. The politics around it – a crackdown on the residents of the Lower Eastside, FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s flattering of Trump, the inflated ticket prices – have been off-putting, and initially I thought I wouldn’t engage. But then the carnival arrived, and you see Canada supporters of all ages, heritages, and sizes, walking around with smiles on their faces. There’s nothing (yet) of the right-wing thuggery that I associate with soccer in Europe. At times, there’s almost a sense of Durkheimian collective effervescence in the city, its totem perhaps Science World on False Creek, redecorated for the duration of the competition as a monstrous soccer ball
Parallel to this, there’s also an inner life, marked off from the outer world much as shade’s marked off from sunlight, and yet with an inextricable connection to it. I felt this strange connection most strongly in summers in Vancouver as a graduate student in the early 19090s. I’d bring my portable computer, notebooks, and library books up to the library on the top of the then Graduate Student Centre at Thea Koerner House at UBC. The space at the time was quite ramshackle, with old wooden tables and randomly shelved, uncatalogued books that had perhaps belonged to the original donor, Leon Koerner. There were also sliding wooden doors that led onto a very narrow balcony lined with mosaic tiles. You could read sitting on a plastic chair that you’d dragged out into the sun, legs resting on the railing, and then retreat back indoors to write up your notes. The view from the north side of the building in particular was magnificent, across Burrard Inlet to the North Shore and Bowen Island. Look up Howe Sound and you’d see mountains covered in white snow, even in summer. Further upwards, bald eagles would circle in the sky.
So, in the middle of this beauty, I’ve been reading. It’s interesting rather than to focus on a book, as I sometimes do, to consider the full menu of what I’ve read. It’s also a good exercise for me to look back. The forgetfulness of age often conspires with a shallow reading caused by too much absorption in social media, and it’s useful to try to remember what I have already almost forgotten.
I began the month finishing a novel I’d begun on my trip to the UK, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. This is another literary mountain that in my academic career I for some reason never got to climb. It was central to our Victorian Literature syllabus at undergraduate level, but I took that course in the last year of my undergraduate degree, when I’d disengaged from my studies, and was focusing on only a few key texts for the exams. I never came back to the period in graduate study. The novel was challenging to read at first, and realised just how much I had become used to a different mode of reading. If social media and handphones have encouraged skimming, I also find that movies, television, and even a fair amount of contemporary fiction are strongly plot-driven. At first I began reading the novel on an Ipad, in which the software would prompt me to meet my daily reading goal. Then I moved to hard copy, and developed a different rhythm. In Robyn Warhol’s phrase, I began reading like a Victorian, not so much in terms of reading distinct serialised episodes, but rather reading a chapter at a time, appreciating the way it was formed, and then pausing, rather than skimming over in search of the next event of the plot. This restored to me some of the pleasures of slow reading that I’ve perhaps lost over the years: registers of subtle irony, character development, literary references to savour, interwoven imagery. And if Dorothea’s idealism was still the centre of the novel, I found I had known, through my own scholarly career, several Casaubons: perhaps there’s a little of Casaubon and his impossible Key to All Mythologies in all academics, and I felt at times some empathy for him. And then, of course, that strangely comforting conclusion about unseen lives we have and unacknowledged contributions we all make, that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
I managed to extend my reading habits to two more novels: Daniel Kehlman’s The Director and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say. Kehlman’s novel, in Ross Benjamin’s translation, about the return of the film director G.W. Pabst to Nazi-occupied Europe, and his subsequent complicity with the regime, was engaging in both its themes and in individual writerly moments; the first chapter’s one of the most convincing accounts I’ve seen that attempts to take on the point of view of someone living with dementia. At the same time, I wondered about the loose historicization – the invention of a son’s name and experience, for example – which often didn’t seem to have an artistic rationale: it didn’t cause us to reflect on the nature of fictionalisation, for instance, because it wasn’t foregrounded. Strout’s book was as magnificent as always, and a little darker than much of her writing, cutting a little further into the emotional underbellies of seemingly uneventful Massachusetts lives.
I also read three books of non-fiction. George Abbott’s Unceded: Understanding British Columbia’s Colonial Past and Why It Matters Now had been on my reading list since its publication. Much of the research for the book, I imagine, comes Abbott’s doctoral dissertation that he wrote at the University of Victoria after leaving provincial electoral politics. The first half of the book was a little ponderous in terms of narrative. Abbott’s research on the process of establishment of inadequate reserves for First Nations peoples in the absence of treaties may well be important and indeed pathbreaking – I don’t know the history well enough to know how many new sources are used – but for me it didn’t significantly alter the narrative of dispossession I already knew. The book came more strongly alive in its second half, when it began to draw on Abbott’s own political experience in government with the BC Liberals, and showed clearly how conservative politicians recycled tropes from a century before. While Abbott shows pride in part of his record, he also expresses regret at some decisions he took; it’s perhaps an indictment of our contemporary politics that he only came to a fuller understanding of the colonial past after leaving government, some years after he served as Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation. Next up was C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, which explores the way in which rankings and scoring systems seem to have become ends in themselves in contemporary society, losing any resonance that they might have as proxies for real values. The book’s well written, although perhaps a little formulaic: gestures to personal anecdotes just when they’re needed, and a coining of terminology – some of it useful, such as “value capture” – some of it less so. In many way it’s like a lot of such books written largely by liberal North American academics for a wider audience: easy to read, but not really engaging fully with scholarship, especially here not making connections to sociology or political science rather than just game studies.
My final book was for me the most thought-provoking, Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country, her history of the Jewish Labor Bund. It’s a long, complex and tortured story that begins in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe and ends in contemporary New York. Crabapple draws on a personal archive, the paintings made from memory of her great-grandfather Sam Rothfort, to illuminate other archival and biographical material from the past. It’s inevitably a partial account; at times I found myself wondering about the subjectivities of progressive actors who became the antagonists for Crabapple’s Bundist heroes., and this became almost caricatured. Yet it would be difficult to tell history in a different way, and in particular a history of striving to keep certain values central: socialism, opposition to colonialism in all its forms, a trust in humanity despite the evidence of history. For me, the book speaks to the present moment, but I think perhaps not as proscriptively as some commentators have suggested; it’s not simply about the possibilities of a progressive, non-Zionist Jewish identity. As Crabapple suggests at her book’s end, it’s about a movement that lost but did not entirely fail, and which perhaps in its refusals can still teach us a lesson: for the historically oppressed who turn the tables on historic oppressors, only a strong commitment to values prevents a renewed cycle of violence.
And in my outer world, just when we began to worry about drought, the rain has made a welcome return.