“I had this dreamlike feeling of nearing some place I’d been looking for—a vacancy just my shape, hidden inside an enormous puzzle.” —Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts

COME ON IN

Welcome to New Stanza. As this is our first post, I’ll say a few words about what we (the editorial we) will be doing and not doing here.

DOING: Casually and amusingly discussing books we’ve read, reading in general, our favourite authors, music we’ve heard, movies we’ve watched, and aught else that snags our attention. “Casually” because I am no expert, on anything, not even myself (see below); in fact, I don’t think I’ve even attained dilettante status yet. “Amusingly” while allowing that amusement is in the funny-bone of the beholder.

NOT DOING: Discussing religion (except in a cultural sense), politics, or sports. You can explore such topics elsewhere with folks who actually know something about them.

We’re aiming for a good-natured space here, a refuge of sorts from the customary sturm und drang. So, not exactly Pollyanna, but at least dependably rant free.

We’ll have regular features, some of which you’ll find in this post, and some deeper dives into things I’ve thunk about more than once.

A WORD ABOUT SYNCHRONICITY

Synchronicity: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection [Oxford English Dictionary].

“Know Thyself,” advises Apollo on the portico of his Temple at Delphi. Easy for him to say, being after all a god. For us mortals, life can present many puzzles, not least of which is ourselves, especially while we’re still finding our place in the world. Little did I know back in Grade 12 that my hastily conceived but curiously satisfying English essay “The Dubious Role of Coincidence in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago” would foreshadow aspects of my later life in ways that in retrospect seemed inevitable.

Synchronicity, existing as it does outside the bounds of probability and often on the borders of believability, can seem like a gift or a challenge, offering us a piece of the puzzle whose solution might unlock our destiny, clarify some deeper meaning, reveal our true selves. A friend of mine used to call such unexpected coincidences life’s “ha, ha, made you look” moments. And when you look, maybe you see a choice you hadn’t yet made, an association hitherto unconsidered, a new plot point in the story you’re always making of your life in the everyday, non-synchronous world. Philip K. Dick claimed that he used the I Ching to make most of the plot decisions in his masterpiece The Man in the High Castle. Now, jaded veteran that I am, I consider divination techniques like the I Ching to be the DoorDash of synchronicity: coincidence dialed up to order isn’t quite the real thing for me, valuable though its insights might be, and have been for me. But I admit I may have been the teensiest bit guilty over the years of doing something analogous to what Dick was doing—but with the plot of my own life. That’s because the frisson that synchronistic moments bestow on us can be habit forming, often at the expense of our free will and sense of responsibility for our own destiny. If I may mix metaphors clumsily, within these nuggets of wisdom lie seeds of temptation.

With me being the easily tempted sort, you can guess where I ended up. I realized I needed to dial back my focus on synchronicity and deal with life on its rational, boring, everyday terms more than I’d been doing. After hammering out hundreds of thousands of words on my old blog, I—and the universe—needed a break from my obsession. But a little nip now and then won’t hurt, right? After all, synchronicity is always there, part of “the buried strangeness that nourishes the known,” to quote poet Richard Wilbur. Best learn how to deal with it rationally and moderately rather than trying to ignore what might by now be an inescapable, essential aspect of myself, so deeply embedded that to try to perform a radical synchronectomy might lead to one of those “the operation was a success but the patient died” scenarios. Which leads us to the first of our regular features. These little stories are all cross-my-heart true, and hopefully improbable enough to whet your appetite for more:

SYNCHRO-SNACK OF THE WEEK

Walking in my neighbourhood one evening in September 1990, I ran into Larissa, the near-twin sister of a young woman I was infatuated with at the time. As always, her name (and, yes, her beauty, I’m only human) brought to my mind Doctor Zhivago, the movie and the book. We exchanged pleasantries and I continued on my way, to meet a couple of guys for drinks at the pub. Over the next few hours we were joined by others, two of whom introduced me to their girlfriends. One named Julie, the other named Christie. Amazingly, it didn’t hit me until the next day.

Maybe it was Pasternak’s retort to my jejune little essay 17 years earlier. (“Oh yeah? Too many coincidences? Watch this, ya little malyavka.”)

BOOK OF THE WEEK

For our next regular feature, we’ll say a few words about the novel that provided our introductory quote, Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts. She’s Canadian, and that, along with the subject matter (pop music) and the delicious packaging from Doubleday Canada—inventive cover image showcasing the table of contents wherein each chapter is a song title; sturdy, fragrant paper; French flaps; those wonderful scalloped pages—lured me onward. It’s her first novel, and her bio indicates that in this romance the female protagonist, Percy Marks, is in some sense reliving that bio in a different form.

The deep cuts in the title refer to recordings, or songs, that might not be the most popular or most played on an album or in an artist’s repertoire but nevertheless stand the test of time, over many, many listens. Percy, the young pop music aficionada, stresses that she “didn’t get into music . . . I got into songs.” An important distinction if the deep cut is a stand-in for a deep person or a deep, lasting relationship with such a person. She winds up helping such a person write songs—some of which become deep cuts themselves. There are the inevitable obstacles—deep cuts to the spirit—before Percy’s destiny unfolds, and her puzzle is finally solved.

I liked this enough to have read it twice. Brickley has a way with the unexpected, inventive image: “We kept talking and couldn’t stop. Time stretched like pulled taffy, dipping and clumping.”

As the story is set in the first decade of this century, I encountered a lot of pop music and trends I knew little or nothing about. In some cases with good reason, I’ve since surmised, but it did remind me—for a few terrifying seconds there before denial reset itself—just how old I actually am. Thanks, Holly, I needed that. Really. But only for a few seconds.

I’ll say more in the coming weeks about this book, and about my recent reconnection with contemporary lit in general.

One more thing you should know about me: I’m a Prousthead. Marcel Proust, that “old teahead of Time,” as Jack Kerouac calls him, has taken up honorary permanent residence in my notebooks these past 30 years, so we’ll be giving him his own segment:

PROUST QUOTE OF THE WEEK

You remember the story of the man who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a bottle. It was a form of insanity. He was cured of it. But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies which we must not seek to cure, because they alone protect us from others that are more serious. [Spoken by the irrepressible Baron de Charlus]

SONG OF THE WEEK

Finally, we’ll try for a deep cut ourselves, and end up where we started from, with The Yardbirds and their late-1965 “For RSG.” This is their studio version of a Bo Diddley B-side called “Here ‘Tis” that had been their most frenzied live “rave-up” number at the Marquee Club in Soho in earlier days. RSG here refers to Ready, Steady, Go, which was a hot TV show featuring current pop stars, sort of the Brit version of American Bandstand. There’s a Calgary connection here, as one of the original presenters was David Gell, who eventually ended up here hosting CBC local news for years.

In the studio the group was meticulous about building their rhythm/backing tracks (“the buried strangeness that nourishes the known”), and the propulsive effect here is typically “Yardmerizing” for its time. As they used to say then about such new releases in the UK music press, “A lively effort with inventive production and the customary wizardry from guitarist Jeff Beck; should do well for the boys.”

So, without further ado, here ’tis.

JUST ONE MORE THING, COLUMBO-STYLE

Just after I finished this post, I was rooting around in the storage catacombs of our basement for a small box to store my Pocketbook e-reader and its cable and documentation. I pulled a likely looking one out the dark, unfathomable depths and found this: