Jay Miller : Porto, Portugal and Dad is Dying

 

 

 

I realize now that I must have downloaded The Vinyl Café at the most opportune time because it appears to have been scraped off the web, so the CBC can do a podcast about the behind-the-scenes of it, which really should be its own separate thing but isn't. This rendition starts with an ad for Mint Mobile with fucking Ryan Reynolds in it. 

But because I am in Martinique and my computer is off and my old new phone is dead, I am working off my old hand-me-down phone that doesn't have the unedited radio broadcasts on it. No matter, really.

But, I will say this for any data hoarders out there: if you're looking for a feasible challenge, try to cobble together the extant list of Vinyl Café story titles from their original air date and associated MP3 files. I'm certain it's still doable, but requires some effort. As it is, I think I have roughly 100 of them more or less appropriately titled on several devices, but technically every episode has 2 titles I believe, and neither variant is truly descriptive unless you're already familiar with the context of the particular story, so both almost equally... I don't want to come off harsh by saying useless, but a synopsis of each episode is also hard to come by if I recall correctly. With some effort, a solid archive could be DIY'd. I digress.

We were planning a trip to Portugal. We'd never been, don't speak the language, don't crave the food, and don't know the history of it. But, we had heard Lisbon was overrated and therefore flights to Porto cheap.

Earlier today we were languishing in the Martinique after work commute congestion, heading back to our hotel, listening to the special "ask us anything" episode of The Europeans podcast. The penultimate question, if memory serves me well, was "what European country have you not yet visited but is at the top of your list to go to next?" and I not only remarked at what a good question that was, I immediately spoke over the broadcast to ask Patrycja, since we were looking for a third country to visit this summer while in Poland (we had already been invited by her italophilic mother to go to Italy—for our second time—and enthusiastically agreed)—and her immediate response: Portugal.

What did I know about Portugal besides the trip we planned and never did?

I remember John Wall Barger talking about it at length in *Hummingbird*, a poetry collection of his from 2012, my second year of being a reviewer.

All the typical tropes of Portuguese lit were mentioned therein. All the most frequented sights, as to be expected, too. But it was predominantly Lisbon, not Porto, he explored and versified.

The only other thing I recall about Portugal from literature is Eça de Queirós's story about the Greek poet living out of a hotel and trying and failing to woo a woman—he was a big deal, in Greece, but she didn't know Greek, and was unfazed by his supposed literary grandeur.

We have a friend that we adore, Michael, who went to Portugal once. He hopes to buy a house and retire there some day. I hope he does, too, but it doesn't mean anything to me because we've never been.

So anyways, it is the middle of the night in Martinique, I am sat at the alloyed metal table on the patio of our entranceway overlooking the bay of Fort-de-France from L'anse à l'âne, and I catch a title of a Stuart McLean story called "Dad is Dying".

I remember the day I found out my dad was dying, nearly six years ago. It was summer. I was walking out of Métro Snowdon in Montreal, northbound, on my way to the dollar store, when my brother called me. Dad was in a coma. He had had a seizure. He would go on to live another 5 years following this event, and I remember then and there being so not okay with that. I didn't know then that it was the beginning of the end but a part of me always felt like I should have. Probably why I remember it so vividly. I had just seen him that spring.

McLean's story starts with “Most people will tell you that spring is the most reassuring of seasons. They will tell you that it's something about the renewal of the natural world, the return of the sun, the songbirds of God's green garden that puts a spring into their step. This spring came to Dave differently than most.”

That spring was admittedly a blur. I had just gotten promoted at work, for the first time ever, and I had just fallen in love with the most beautiful girl I was certain was never going to have the time to find out together what we were. My dad was finally living out his dream of becoming a modern-day Henry David Thoreau, bought a cabin in a secluded wood on the water in North Frontenac, and we were working on our grief together following the passing of my mother 5 years prior. Life was as good as it had been in as long as I could possibly remember. It brings a tear to my eye now just reflecting on it.

"Like all storms, no one noticed its first stirrings."

The McLean story is funny.

I remember my maternal grandfather dying. I must have been about 12 years old. Papa, we called him. I remember feeling too old to cry, I was so young. At his celebration of life, I cried. Tears of joy, because of all the new stories old friends of his I'd never met had to share with us. Taking a cat in a burlap sack down to the river to drown it and it literally getting out of the bag to defend itself, never to return. Very different times then. Another, taking a fistful of firecrackers down to the same river and seeing if they could make a bucket into a rocket and a piece of shrapnel from said bucket propulsion gone wrong carried in his leg like a reminder for the rest of his days. Big smoker, died less than half a decade short of eighty.

Not my parents. It baffled me then the way it baffles me now: people outlive the people you love all the damn time. There were eighty-year-olds twenty years ago when Papa died as much as there were eighty-year-olds a year-and-a-half ago when my father died. We had a trip planned to go canoeing on Lake Banff the next day, we were in Calgary, and the town was swarming with retirees. I just remember thinking, of all the old folks bumming around, why him? Over time, the sensation dulled, but never faded away. He was only a month shy of 64.

Stuart McLean... it's like what happens if you reverse engineered a Tragically Hip lyric into prose and took all the protagonist out of it.

Porto was the first trip I planned. We must have been in Poddąbie, summer 2022, my father warning me every day about what was going on next door in Ukraine and asking for my reassurance that Poland was safe (of course it was, we were many miles away).

Similar to the trip we never made to Latvia, Porto enticed me enough because of the cheap airfare. We could also fly home to Montreal from there, so if we planned it right, could be a last hurrah on our way back for fall.

We never ended up going but here's the eleven things I had in mind:

The Sandeman Cellars, a-k-a The House of Sandeman. As a fan of tawny port since 2020 (a versatile bottle for the hopeless wreck I was during the first year of the pandemic, chilled port with a slice of orange was as refined as any cocktail exceeding more than one ingredient to concoct) and sherry (absolutely crucial for my favourite drink at some point in time, a memory lost to time I'm afraid to admit, but available in many lovely variants), it was the first stop on my list. We would only be going if I planned it, so I put my strengths (and spirits) at the forefront of my mind.

Next was the Passeio das Virtudes. This seems reminiscent of another landscape I had planned to visit with Patrycja but never went and that is Perugia, Italy. I am certain it is lovely but that was a trip I had planned for November, so less than spectacular weather for travelling. Perhaps I'll expound another time. The thing about Passeio das Virtudes that strikes me this very moment, however, is how similar the houses on the hill seem to the ones here in Martinique.

Claus Porto was next. They do soaps and perfumes, although apparently the duty-free at the airport sells the same. If you're looking for a boutique experience, however, they have their own history of Porto to share, and, if you're lucky, an old-fashioned hot towel shave.

Now that I think of it, I think my dad had been to Lisbon. He got me a few books in Portuguese from one of his trips to Europe after Mom died. He had always wanted to travel; her, not so much. It comes to mind because the next place I had in mind was Livraria Lello, an absolutely breathtaking bookshop with massive ornate staircase in what, at a glance, appears to be red velvet and mahogany, a stainglass skylight, and architectured ceiling. I'm sure it's even more stunning in person. Never a fan of Harry Potter myself, its mixture of neogothic and art nouveau design was allegedly the inspiration for Hogwarts. The transphobe who lived.

Everything in Porto is so damn historical. Speaking of stories, I completely lost sight of Stuart McLean. The dog is dying. Sam thought he was too old to be crying about his dog dying so he told his class his dad was dying instead to save face. Hilarity ensues.

My mother used to spend all weekend making long-distance phone calls. She'd talk and talk and talk for hours with all her old friends, all the women who had been part of our lives growing up in Kitchener-Waterloo. One of them, our godmother, Jojo, passed shortly after our father went. I got word from our old neighbourhood friend Peter, who messaged me from Germany. Wish we had been invited to her funeral. Too much to deal with in the wake of our father's death, but still would've been nice. Her husband JP died years ago. I remember talking with her after our mother died. She suggested I get my license to become a PI. Saleema Nawaz Webster, a Montreal writer whose *Mother Superior* collection I absolutely adored when I reviewed it years after its release, recently did that. Makes sense. Maybe I see in her what Joanne saw in me.

Stuart McLean... I wonder what will ever happen to all those secondhand copies of Vinyl Café hardbacks. Synonymous with retirees, church benefit book fairs, Adirondack chairs and sunsets. There were too many when he was still alive. Does anyone under 30 even listen to radio anymore? Let alone the CBC? It's always been a bit tough to see being Canadian as being cool. You tell anyone but an American about CBC Radio, god forbid Stuart McLean, and they wouldn't have an NPR to compare it to, and BBC doesn't really match up. Yet only attractive people seem to wear those vintage CBC tees, so maybe I'm the problem. As it is, still love tuning in. Quirks and Quarks, The Debaters, Under the Influence? Perfection.

The rest of my Porto-to-do list consists entirely of restaurants: O Diplomata, Musa das Virtudes, Época Café, Casa Guedes Tradicional, Adega de São Nicolau, Gazela Cachorrinhos Da Batalha.

Back in 2022, these likely held more currency. I am dubious there was a more obvious theme now, but perhaps I got really deep with it. By name, they all appear to be different kinds of restaurants, different experiences, not just different menus. Perhaps I picked them based on our potential accommodation. I don't have it listed anywhere. I probably had Queirós's hotel in mind. Looking at all these dishes is making me hungry. Like us, you may seldom think of Portuguese chicken, or bread, or beer, but seeing this flurry of images now, I can't think of anything in the world I'd like more than that, if not another splash of Martinique rum.

Sam, Dave and Morley's kid on The Vinyl Café, finally spills the beans: it's not my dad that's dying, my dog is dying.

"My dog's going to be all right! It was just worms!"

Word spread through the neighbourhood like wildfire.

I wish my father had been diagnosed. In five years of non-epileptic seizures and a rollercoaster of unrelated maladies, he never had the privilege of finding out the cause.

I don't know what sort of nonsense the medical profession has succumbed to in Ontario since I left, but they barely treated my mom 10 years earlier much better either.

Quebec has its own crisis, too. So I get it. But it's one of the few things I think of even though I should: why the hell have we let things get this bad in Canada? What have we done to deserve this? Why is nobody helping? Why is nobody fixing what's broken?

What's going to happen when I end up in hospital in my forties, fifties, and sixties? Will I even live long enough to find out?

What if I just need a pill and I end up getting referred to a never-ending parade of specialists in different cities across the province who have too many patients to diagnose me? Who do I call then?

 

Jay Miller is a tech writer and poet. He occasionally posts book reviews on Bibelotages.com and pics of the cat he shares with his beautiful partner Patrycja, @itsthemilashow on Instagram.

Jay Miller : Notes towards The End of the World

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

 

The first time I wrote something for rob mclennan, it was a review of Stuart Ross’s The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. I know many writers in Canada and around the world, living and dead, have special connections with Stuart, so I don’t treat mine as an exception. However, I do sometimes feel alone in my appreciation for his discernment of mass media dynamics as they apply to Canadian poetry, which naturally abhors it.

One thing he said that has stuck with me through the years is his nearly Mark Twain-esque critique of those who profess their love of poetry. His response, paraphrased, was that he thought 99% of poetry he read was crap. Now, you may find my paraphrasing here charming or even affable, if not deliberately bombastic, but I assure you that is not the impression I intend to leave upon you.

Without question there are other authors in Canada with sharp opinions but I have never seen a poet say as much in one breath as he had with this one statement of his, likely on Facebook if memory serves me well.

Regardless, bombast and affability were far from his intent, in my opinion. For lack of a less confident adjective, I believe he was speaking pure fact.

It probably isn’t hard to see why I say so but I will tell you how I got there nonetheless before moving on to the questions originally posed to us by rob.

For months, I struggled to get a real start on answering the questions of this series, namely how does a poem begin and what makes a poem good. I’ve wanted, since reading Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (triple-O, for short) in 2023, to carve out a literary criticism praxis that incorporates his positions and I have largely kept this ambition hidden in plain sight since launching my return to book blogging with Bibelotages in 2024, principally because I felt that I had not yet read enough of Harman’s books to find a firm grasp of the value of his work on mine.

So I began, at last, by reviewing my past two years of notes on Graham Harman. I read not only his synonymous OOO (2018) book 2 or 3 times, but also Architecture and Objects (2022) and select essays from The Graham Harman Reader (2023), in addition to watching several of his lectures online and listening to a handful of podcast appearances over time. 

He is as easy on the ears as he is on the page, and, perhaps a bit like Stuart Ross, Harman is burdened with a self-awareness for his unpopular opinions. If only the world of academic philosophy took Graham as seriously as the world of Canadian poetry took Stuart, although I think the latter’s international reception is generally loftier than his domestic praise, if not more sparing. I digress.

The book at the top of my Graham Harman to-be-read list, however, remained untouched for far too long, because life had distracted me and I’m not as hardworking as Graham or Stuart. That book, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (2016), is Graham Harman’s triple-O treatment of the Dutch East India Company as an object, a proverbial Ship of Theseus in terms of dauntingness to deal with from a materialist or social theory perspective:

While it might be assumed that this company was a material object, this view is difficult to sustain under questioning without having to make a number of concessions that are damaging to the materialist standpoint. For one thing, material objects always exist somewhere, but in the case of the VOC it is not at all clear where that place of existence would be. It was certainly not at VOC [Dutch East India Company abbreviated, in Dutch] headquarters in Amsterdam, since most of the company’s operations took place in Southeast Asia; […] Nor was the physical location of the VOC to be found in its Asian capital, Jayakarta or ‘Batavia’ (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia). […] Beyond this, the VOC existed from 1602 to 1795, and no person (and perhaps no ship) lasted for that entire period as an enduring element of the company.

There are many intermittent statements of fact and observation that I’ve intentionally abridged here to cut to the main point of my citation, and that is this:

There is an old philosophical paradox known as the Ship of Theseus, which poses the problem of whether the ship remains the same even when we gradually or suddenly replace each of its boards with a new one - especially if we assemble the old boards together nearby as a rival vessel to the new ship. Without going further into this paradox and its venerable history, it already serves to emphasize what I take to be a chief lesson of the VOC case study: the irreducibility of larger objects to the sum total of their material components. The Dutch East India Company was not just a collection of atoms and strings at various locations in space-time, but to a large extent was able to survive the motion and disappearance of these tiny elements while making use of others.

I think the main thing that prevented me from connecting what I remember and know of object-oriented ontology and the production and esteem of poetry, or literature in general, was that I made the perfectly honest mistake of expecting to understand it only from the standpoint of the senses, aesthetics, metaphor, or the effects on humankind rather than the object as it exists, ontologically and monadically, and how it comes into existence or emerges, and inevitably, disappears.

The fact of the matter is that Stuart Ross’s observation all those many years ago, that the overwhelming majority of poetry is perfunctory slop (still paraphrasing) and the pinnacle of platitudes in the contemporary publishing landscape, for publishers and writers alike, is the overused tagline “I love poetry”, is compelling because it accurately touches on an otherwise hitherto uncovered truth, recognizable but not widely acknowledged, evidenced in publishing houses’ increasingly trendy trend of publishing grad students’ manuscripts that theatrically depict typically one theme or one historical figure or subject then tack on all the pandering buzzwords and ideally in the form of a blurb from a set of authors in order of descending incomes. Call it poetry all you like, but you shouldn’t love it. If you do, then maybe you’re part of the problem. That problem: it’s very obviously not good poetry. Just because it qualifies as poetry doesn’t mean you should like it. The publishing industry is delusional.

Stuart’s pragmatic reaction to his realization was to start an imprint for experimentalism and those were the first works I committed to reviewing for my new blog last year, excited now as I was when he announced it that he would editorially reveal something interesting and enlightening in the process.

Why bring Graham Harman’s philosophy into this at all, you might be wondering. You’re busy, the world is full of quality distraction, and the bulk of it can be at least mildly entertaining. I haven’t even taken the time to review Graham Harman’s work and, although I’ve reviewed 2 of Stuart’s books in the past decade, I prefer to review the books he presides over as editor. In both cases, because it’s daunting.

But this is why Graham Harman’s treatment of the Dutch East India Company feels the most relevant to rob’s questions instead of Harman’s positions on metaphor and aesthetics.

The answer to what makes poetry good is not as simple or symmetrical as answering what constitutes a poem in the same way as summarizing the Dutch VOC by the parts of its whole would be undermining the object. A history book on the Company would not be considered a comprehensive treatment of the subject matter without an explicitly worded understanding of how its lead figures rose to prominence, the thinking behind their decisions, some ounce of interpretation or conjecture based on historical record as to their momentum as an entity and as individuals, so on and so forth.

Merely listing all of the officials, office locations, ships, goods, conflicts, resolutions, policies, successes, failures, and years of operation would be more akin to what you’d expect to find in a Wikipedia entry on the subject.

My strengths as a procrastinator and a yapper lie in their sources as problems: perfectionism and zeal. I never want to speak up, but if I manage to break through my shyness, I never want to shut up. The result is that I read myself back while writing and it can sound self-righteous and long-winded. I don’t want to do that.

If I could put it succinctly, summing up everything I’ve learned from reading Stuart Ross and Graham Harman, I think a poem begins when an object, whether it be The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first snowfall of a Canadian winter, a political post on Instagram, a woman on the Montreal metro looking your way, or the Warsaw Uprising, exerts an influence or causal effect on a poet, and the influence is indirect, it’s finite, and this symbiosis of cause and writer is asymmetrical, irreversible, and does not necessarily result in the person writing a poem.

And a poem is good, for our purposes here meaning worthy of being liked, not merely because it checks all the boxes on a hypothetical checklist that adapts to every written or spoken object referred to as a poem, but because it achieves an effect for the moment it is consumed in, whether as a written text, oral recital, improvisation, or wordless sound poetry, even, or indeed even concrete poetry.

The best way I can account for this is in something I heard the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti say while I was researching him for a review I published online earlier this year:

[H]e paraphrases the poem of al-Shabi, in a way that is more economical yet direct than any written translation out there: “if people decide to live, destiny will obey.” He says with this one line of poetry, the Tunisian was able to spark revolution, in Tunisia and in Egypt, a century after it was composed.

I am not trying to say that a poem must spark revolution in order to be deemed good (morally good or well-made, in any case). But there is something to the way Graham Harman treats knowledge, as either what something does or what something is, that I think lends itself to my explanation, and it’s something I think Stuart Ross would agree with by way of extending his observation that not all poetry deserves your love.

This is from the introduction to Harman’s Immaterialism on the Dutch East India Company, where he expresses remorse for the fact that the editors of this book chose to cut out so much of what he deemed relevant to conveying his point of view, marking the distinction between the flat ontology of Bruno Latour’s revered but short-sighted Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which treats all objects as things that act, and his own object-oriented ontology:

Whether we praise objects for their agency or brashly deny that they have any, we overlook the question of what objects are when not acting. To treat objects solely as actors forgets that a thing acts because it exists rather than existing because it acts.

Harman’s concern is with continental philosophy’s delusion of boasting about decentering humans from the humanities and social sciences while still exclusively centering discourse on relations between humans and unrealistically not acknowledging the facticity and totality of non-human objects in the universe at large and humankind’s relative irrelevance among them.

So, if what poetry is doesn’t define what makes it good (i.e. Dante’s Commedia isn’t good because it is written in terza rima, it’s poetry because it’s written with poetic form and metre), and what poetry does (does it do any good?) cannot always be fully realized within the duration of a single human lifespan (if al-Shabi’s revolution song was good when it was originally composed, was it not just as good or better when it echoed through the streets of Cairo almost a hundred years later during the Arab Spring?), then how can we know for certain what makes a poem good?

I do not lack the confidence to conclude that, beyond human perception, what makes a poem good is its unknowable potential and our perception or indirect, or knowingly self-aware incomplete, contact with that.

If I say I like T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, as a critic, I am saying I see something good in it, even if that good is relative or finite to being symbolic of catalyzing literary modernism in 20th century Western Europe, and, as a critic, I disapprove of Eliot’s inspired religiosity or strategic associations with other poets.

It’s not only what he wrote and how it made an impact in his lifetime, nor the aftereffects of it continuing beyond during ours, but the sonority, complexity, and interpretability that I think extends beyond human relations, if, say, in the future, planet Earth is left in ruins and our species has died and all civil infrastructure has been destroyed or overrun by vegetation or disappeared by meteorological disaster or the erosion of water over a long stretch of time, to the point where the galaxy we inhabit not only never witnesses our escape from within, but becomes a makeshift sort of museum or run down abandoned space age ghost town that ended in a worldwide mass murder-suicide pact.

Or like that one scene near the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once where the mother and daughter come back as everything in the multiverse, including as sentient telepathic rocks, except in my allegory the rocks are not sentient or telepathic, nor do they possess googly eyes, they’re just regular everyday rocks, and The Wasteland happens to be playing on an infinite loop from a solar-powered Bluetooth sound system at them, as a natural riff off of artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library project, only old works instead of new ones.

Or that right before humanity’s certain demise someone reflects on Eliot’s speaker of the poem countenancing pestilence and silently nods to themselves that all those decades ago that meek little limey-wannabe American banker in London was onto something and we should have heeded the signs before it was too late even though The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was objectively the better, if not less demure, verse, he can be forgiven because his rhymes were on point, alas here we are at the end of the world and we have nothing to show for but a handful of good poems.

That’s usually how the good ones start.

 

 

 

 

Jay Miller is a technical writer, translator, and poet. He is @sootynemm on Instagram and he blogs on Bibelotages.com which doubles as a newsletter. He lives in Montreal.