Presentation

So here is our plan as laid out in our meeting:

- Write up all our ideas on this super-blog (all our badass quotes), for each other's reference.

- Put together a structured presentation from all these ideas - ideally, each of us talks about the element of the novel which most interests us.

- We'll do a conventional handout, then clean up this blog so that it's only got A) things that we're happy to share with the rest of the group, and B) resources (like videos, links). We'll put up an anti plagiarism warning to stop people nicking our precious ideas, and using it to create Skynet.

- For the group discussion:

* Use the whiteboard to write up cool ideas? (JG)

* Split the class into groups, briefly, and ask questions which relate Fugitive Pieces to the other books on the curriculum, to help with writing essays.

* Concentrate on the THEMATIC LINKS of the book - we don't want to get dragged down into a vulvacentrism / postmodernism slough of despond.

* JG fancies doing some work on the linguistic technique of the book.

Also, I suggest we TIME our presentations.

Another idea - why don't we tell the class that we will put the **full** transcript of our presentation on the blog - then they don't have to get absorbed in their note taking, and they can properly LISTEN to our presentation. It makes the "oral presentation" a valuable teaching tool, rather than a crappy way of relaying detailed theoretical analysis.

more quotes (now w/pt. 2)

Here are a few more quotes I picked up on. Mike's covered it pretty thoroughly (particularly crucial is the translation segment in 108-9), but here are a few more that can be added to our library.

(absence of sound vs. absence of sight)
pg 11: 'I can't hear. This is more frightening to me than darkness, and when I can't stand the silence any longer, I slip out of my wet skin, into sound.'

(existence in/separation from history)
pg 17: 'I did not witness the most important events of my life'

(transmitted histories)
pg. 20: 'Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history'

(same)
pg 28: 'Athos's stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence'

(egocentricity and other selves)
pg 60: 'His touch felt natural to me, though all else was like a dream. And it was his touch that kept me from falling into myself too far'

(atrocities exploited)
pg 70: 'Send the tourists to the burnt-out chorios. These are our historic sites now. Let the tourists visit modern ruins'

(language as constructive and destructive)
pg 78: 'A single letter was a matter of life and death'

pg 79: 'I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me'

(humanity's active ability to shape history - not deterministic)
pg 84: 'There was luck in the islanders sailing to the mainland for safety, but first they had to heed the signs... There was luck in our meeting, Jakob, but first you had to run.'

(geological identity)
pg 86: "What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides"

(language)
pg 101: 'And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

(interpersonal absence)
pg 115: "When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone"

(research)
pg 120: 'In his research, Athos descends so far that he reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption of tragedy.'

(murder as denying access to the future)
pg 120:"Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his own life."

this is interelated to a quote from earlier on:

pg 24: 'The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexity of desires eternally denied'

(theoretical vs. the practical - tied into the feminist fiction/theory concept? marlatt vs. michaels - male protagonists)
pg 132: 'How could I discuss their upper-class communism with them, those who shone with certainty and had never had the misfortune of witnessing theory refuted by fact?'

(interpretation)
pg 136: 'One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it'

(history and memory existing as one)
pg 140: 'Every moment is two moments'

(the inevitability of the fictional in biography)
pg 141: 'Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man's life are invisible. Unknown to others as our dreams. And nothing releases the dreamer; not death in the dream, not waking.'

(construction of self through memory)
pg 144: 'But each time a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of me with it.'

(history shaping ideology)
pg 160: 'History is the poisoned well, seeping into the groundwater. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know.'

(ephemeral nature of memory)
pg 170: 'I long for memory to be spirit, but I fear it is only skin.'

(the tangible, touchable nature of her skin operating in the present allows the past, his memories, to be silenced momentarily... Michaela's ability to shape the present separates her from the dead)
pg 180: 'Instead of the dead inhaling my breath with their closeness, I am deafened by the buzzing drone of Michaela's body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin'

and
pg 181: 'But there is no tinge of death in Michaela's skin'

(violent separation from past - affirmation of the corporeal)
188: 'This is where I become irrevocably unmoored... suspended in the present'
189: 'Now, inside Michaela yet watching her, death for the first time makes me believe in the body'

(scent, microhistories, piecing together a day)
191: 'I search Michaela for fugitive scents... I trace her day'

................
II.

(silence, physical/emotional divide)
204: 'We slept close, knowing we could not have such pleasure without such muteness'

(post-holocaust relief, affirmation of life/faith)
205: 'Every thing belonged to, had been retrieved from, impossibility - both the inorganic and the organic - shoes and socks, their own flesh'

(power of language - tie in to graffiti pt.I)
207: 'Who knew that even one letter - like the "J" stamped on a passport - could have the power of life or death'

(memory - physical, shared history)
211: 'A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled'

(holocaust photographs/bog people - leading up to this moment... The historical unknowns preserved in fragments)
221: 'I can see now that my fascination wasn't archeology or even forensics: it was biography. The faces that stared out at me across the centuries, with creases in their cheeks like my mother's face when she fell asleep on the couch, were the faces of people without names. They stared and waited, mute. It was my responsibility to imagine who they might be'

(approaches to history)
222: 'The quest to discover another's psyche, to absorb another's motives as deeply as your own, is a lover's quest. But the search for facts... all this amounts to nothing if you can't find the assumption your subject lives by'

233: 'But I was born into absence. History had left a space already fetid with undergrowth...'

242: 'She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you the most'

(traces of past existence)
265: '...in the knit of atoms, their touch is left behind. Every room emanated absence yet was drenched with your presence'

(true meaning, true identity - unification of body and soul... bit of a nod to the ideas of In the Skin of Lion here)
267: 'Your poems from those few years with Michaela, poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future. Your words and your life no longer separate, after decades of hiding in your skin'

(shaking the past from the present)
278: 'I shook myself free of a million lives, an unborn for every ghost, over Petra's firm belly and brown thighs...'

(reshaping history: fictional/imaginational)
279: 'They dug the bodies out of the ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man's memories then another's, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine...'

(body vs. memory...)
285: '...I can't tell you what her wrists look like, or the knot of bone of her ankle... I know what she makes of her memories. I know what she remembers. I know her memories.'

Some quotes and concepts

I read through my notes in the novel, and here are some quotes I liked at the time, and some general ideas/concepts:

------------------

Fugitive Pieces Quotes:

[Preface]

“During the Second World War, countless manuscripts – diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts – were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden – buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors – by those who did not live to retrieve them.

Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered, by circumstance alone.

…Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. “A man’s experience of war,” he once wrote, “never ends with war. A man’s work, like his life, is never completed.”

[[re-presentation of stories, hidden stories, importance of memory]]

p5 – ‘Time is a blind guide’

p22 – ‘slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory’

[[language]]

p25 – ‘when I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.’

[[persistence of loss, memory]]

p53 – ‘we long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment’

[[identity, immigration, memory, geology]]

p86 – ‘in xenetia – in exile,” said Athos on our last night with Daphne and Kostas in their garden, “in a foreign landscape, a man discovers the old songs. He calls out for water from his own well, for apples from his own orchard, for the Muscat grapes from his own vine’

[[immigration, memory, identity]]

p89 – ‘Like Athens, Toronto is an active port. It’s a city of derelict warehouses and docks, of waterfront silos and freight yards, coal yards and a sugar refinery… It’s a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere – a market, a caravansary – bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell.

[[in fact, 89-90 is a very good section on Toronto and postcolonial identity, as well as geological memory/consciousness, could be good for discussion]]

P92 –‘Athos instructed me in the subtleties of English at the kitchen table on St. Clair avenue. The English language was food. I shoved it into my mouth, hungry for it. A gush of warmth spread through my body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced.’

[[language, identity]]

P95 – ‘Language. The numb tongue attaches itself, orphan, to any sound it can: it sticks, tongue to cold metal. Then, finally, many years later, tears painfully free.’

[[ditto]]

P102-3 – ‘these weekly explorations into the ravines were escapes to the ideal landscapes; lakes and primeveal forests so long gone they could never be taken away from us. / On these walks I could temporarily shrug off my strangeness because, the way Athos saw the world, every human was a newcomer.’

[[geology and its relation to identity, and immigration]]

P108-9 – ‘This was my first introduction to translating. And translating of one sort or another has supported me ever since. For this intuition, I will always be grateful to Kostas. “Reading a poem in translation,” wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing / two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.’

[[another good section – immigration – immigrative action of the poet/translator, crossing boundaries, defamiliarisation ???]]

P111 – ‘I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared.’

‘I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.

If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is only a tangle of wires.’

P119 – ‘he often applied the geologic to the human, analysing social change as he would a landscape; slow persuasion and catastrophe. Explosions, seizures, floods, glaciation. He constructed his own historical topography.’

[[geology, obviously]]

P126 – ‘Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me. How will she ever find me here, beside the strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?’

[[loss as two-way process, the dead are present in memory, still living through mourning. The stasis of the remembered while the rememberer will always be changing, growing]]

--

---[I really like the section which in my edition is 127-128, in the music library, in which cultures, countries, people and history all link together in wordplay, communication and language… postmodern play and breaking of borders in speech:

P128 – ‘Ceylon! Abyssinia Samoa. Can’t Roumania; Tibet. Moscow!’]---

--

P132 – Alexandra – ‘in her mouth, English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot’

P137 – ‘Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra cognita and terra incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory’

P138 – ‘history is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers’

P193 – ‘there’s no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it’s given a use. Or as Athos might have said: if one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.’

Is Nothing Sacred? Chasing the almighty $

FUGITIVE PIECES THE MOVIE