Moncton Finale

My Fulbright stay in Moncton has formally ended. And the Frye Festival was the perfect way to do it.

From Wednesday to Friday, I entered the anglophone highschools on the Moncton area and essentially read poems to teenagers. You would be surprised how much poetry still can affect people. The kids were engaged and shocked and were thoroughly moved, I think, which was energizing and validating and anything you need as a writer. I couldn't have asked for a better audience in many cases. Also, I received cool highschool schwag, such as a leather portfolio (from Moncton High), a cookbook (from Caledonia High), and a t-shirt and mug (from Harrison Trimble).

Wednesday night I saw the Zachary Richard concert, where I met the artist. We were just two Cajun anglophones talking to one another in French in Acadie.

Linda came Thursday night just in time for the last poem of my reading, "New Orleans [kudzu king]."

On Friday I conducted my first radio interview, with Radio Canada, and totally in French.

The final event of the Frye Festival (for me at least) was the Frye Jam on Saturday Night, which features readings by authors with musical accompaniment from the band, Les Païens. This was the highlight of the festival. I "performed" four poems quite theatrically while the band played amazing and genre bending music from and industrial rendition of "Offshore" to the Saint James Infirmary behind "New Orleans [final]." It was surprising how well I fell in to adapted the rhythm of my speech to the pulse and melody of the songs. For the first time in my life, I felt like a rock-star.

Incidentally, I feel like I want to cut an album of my poems now.

I didn't stay long after my performance because Linda and I had to drive to Rhode Island, which Linda bravely led--I was burned out after the week of visits and packings and endless endless goodbyes.

Mixing Memory and Desire (brief)

Last night Chuck threw a party for me. We ate Fricot, Bouillée, and Poutine à Troux. You know you're finished when they throw a party for you. And with a few revisions on my final report, the Fulbright committee will know I'm finished too.

I am looking forward to meeting and talking with friends for hours and drinking and laughing and most of all being with Linda again. I'm afraid this hermitage up north has made me socially awkward and that I won't be able to talk to someone outside of the context of the "cultural artist" topic.

Later this week is the Northrop Frye, as I've mentioned. I'll be interviewed and perform readings. I will give Acadie a taste of what's to come.

This I know is a slightly more personal and laconic post. The theory and intellectually melodramatic questions were I know getting out of hand, and it's hard to think that way all the time. In truth, I don't think about culture or art all the time. Mostly I think on specific instances of communications, bits of correspondence, waiting for the time--the era--to pass, missing home, wishing I were with others/away from others, being nostalgic for the future.

Evangeline is being revised and guess the title for the section about Louisiana:

Elegies for a Paradis Terrestre.

Countdown

Okay. I am back in Moncton. This is my last stretch in Canada. In three more weeks, I'll be preparing for the great move back South with Linda. I officially accepted Cornell's offer and already have an apartment in downtown Ithaca. I cannot wait to start the next chapter.

Traveling here and being here is increasingly difficult. There is so much I want to do and see, but not here anymore. I am justing waiting it out. I've even received the rest of my grant money, as if even Canada wants to push me out: you've been a vile and regressive hermit, Christopher, and it's time you go soil your own country. This is welcome. I want to be back in the world, which here, I fear, I am not. Certainly, people have been nice and some are even friends to me, but I am sure that even they can see how being tied here cuts into my wrists and ankles.

In anycase, I hardly have anything to say with this post. I just know that if I am going to keep a blog, I better not wait until I have something clever or important to say.

Shoeless on Claiborne

Among other things, last night, I picked up a hitch-hiker at three in the morning. Before you get hysterical, let me explain.

I was leaving the apartment to pick Linda up from the casino. There was almost no one out: the night of Good Friday, the early morning darkness finally winning over the ambient city-light. At the bus station at the corner of Broadway and Claiborne, there was a ghostly figure. She had no shoes on. She wore a cocktail dress. Her eyes were coal smudges onto her face. There was no indication, other than her standing and breathing, as to whether or not she was alive.

Naturally, I looked away. Living in cities, you find this action easy, if a little embarrassing.

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw her arm jut out, thumb up. I was the only car on the road, but pretended she was not signaling for me. The light was red and I stayed there transfixed for an eternity. She looked at the dearth of oncoming traffic and crossed over to my little car in the middle lane.

Normally, I'd have waved her off. But she was frantic and young. I rolled down my window. "Can you please take me home?" I noticed the pallor and death stain from before was her mascara smudged about her face. "I'm a law student." "Please." I waited until I saw both her hands holding nothing. "Please."

I opened the door. I said, "My fiancée's going to kill me."

Turns out, she was more afraid than I was, though less of a coward. She cried and tried to make small talk. As far as I could tell, her story was true: her boyfriend left her on her 28th birthday, somehow stranding her on the side of Claiborne. When I dropped her off at the Garden District mansion she lived in, she was incredulous that she had no shoes.

--

Afterwards, I was exhilarated as I told Linda. But what I was thinking the whole time is this: why don't we stop for anyone? Often I see accidents or people with car trouble, and the most I do is feel guilty. Same goes for chairs in the middle of the road, abandoned animals, and certainly hitchhikers. Something's changed here. Maybe it's New Orleans, maybe it's America. But you don't stop anymore.

I think to myself, what if I hadn't stopped this time? But worse, what about all the times I haven't stopped?

In terms of culture, New Orleans bills itself as the big easy, right? A place where people can get along and help one another. Cajuns think this of themselves too. So does about any culture I can think of. But the truth of the matter is that something's gone awry. Nothing is safe. Except maybe the lone hitchhiker, a 28-year-old blonde in a cocktail dress sans shoes.

The Borders are Illusory

Presently, I am in the Charles Hotel of downtown Bangor Maine, which is affordable and has free Internet. I was told by the receptionist that famous novelist Stephen King lives just around the block (it's a little farther than all that!). I briefly contemplated going to Mr. King's mansion and asking if he would come to dinner with me, which I decided against. According to the receptionist, whom I am beginning to suspect is the owner: "We here in Bangor protect his privacy." I decided that I would not voyage into Bangor for a picture of his stylized gate, although if I weren't alone, I probably would have.

In the nearest and most open of the three Irish pubs in walking distance, I ate a burger and a hoppy beer while reading a study of how Cajuns (and all other ethnicities) appropriate the views of outsiders as their own, creating a social fiction of their qualities. Such as "Cajuns like to dance." Which is patently false. I know many Cajuns who hate to dance. And many who hate Cajun music. But they are no less Cajun than I am.

In terms of this, what can one's culture even be, if not the stereotypes one becomes proud of? I asked my waitress about the drink that I read in Esquire is responsible for 90 percent of Bangor's crime (Incidentally, I opted not to eat at the bar the writer of that article went to, which is the other pub, which although open, seemed too neighborhood and was sort of physically underground). She wasn't sure until I showed her the article, which described the drink as a "poor man's Kahlua." She said, "Oh that must be {insert brand name of liquor here}, that's very Maine."

Is it? Is it very Cajun that I have a wry sense of human that is often inappropriate? Or that I do, in fact, love to dance? My brother wants to move to Germany. I know countless kids from my hometown who want to draw comics about cars, play pop songs on guitar, get laid, get a career, begin a family. I do know one or two who champion French as a culture saving machina. But are they more Cajun than the others?

The article is interesting in its postmodernity. Because if cultures disappear, if we settle for the fact that we compile our cultures from the tatters and ends of observations that outsiders use to generalize our ethnic groups, what do we have? The fact that people are inherently alike, that Italians aren't even that different from Blacks and that Acadians are have more in common with les maudits anglais than not.

I for one do not want to eradicate culture for this or any other reason--though I feel it important to recognize that cultural boundaries can fall away like any oversized, second hand pair of pants. And besides, differences are in place--though these generally have to do with mores and ideological attitudes, rather than artistic or industrial inclinations (or disinclinations). Recognizing the limitations of culture can free us from all sorts of bonds--the insecurity of fulfilling or rejecting certain cultural stereotypes, the pull of xenophobia which is often more pronounced within insular, ethnic enclaves, and most importantly, the impass which makes us view other humans not at singular entities but the sum total of our expectations.

You say you want a revolution?

The last I posted, if I recall, was about a hurricane, a storm, barrelling through Moncton, barrelling through my life, my work. And now, I am writing this on borrowed time in New Orleans. Don't worry: I will be back on my tour of duty later this week. It is probably forty to sixty degrees colder in Moncton right now than it is here. I would bet.

I honestly don't know what to say since I've last written. The last few months have given new meaning to the idea ruin value, at least for me. The idea of beautiful dissembling, the shards of a former reality shown to be nothing but dissimulations, just gaudy façades of a former, more idealistic era. I, of course, finished the first third of Evangeline. Now I write about the great exile North, a voluntary sequestering, a minor conquest, a minor treasure. I will begin the deconstruction of Acadie soon.

As far as travel goes, maybe I've lost myself in it. The idea of home doesn't quite exist the same way in French as it does in English. There is no direct translation with the nuance and aplomb of home. With the variegated images, the smell of vanilla, the warmth of flesh on flesh. Right now, it's as if I want to echo Duras's screenplay: ELLE: J'ai tout vu à Hiroshima. LUI: Non, tu n'as rien vu. I don't know anything.

Perhaps this is what le Grand Dérangement means afterall: the loss of knowledge, the annihilation of all the former myths you told about yourself, the endless and endless waiting for the next thing to define you, give you shelter, give you repose, devastate you. This will be the title for my second sequence in Evangeline, the part about driving to Canada: Le Grand Dérangement, the great upheaval, the great moving, the diaspora, the exile. You see, the difference in my telling is that the threat of exile is never from without, but from the self, the oblivion of the love relationship, and the comfort in thinking you know what the right thing to do is. The threat is volition.

If this is not indication enough, let me be clear: I am back in action.