Soft Zipper

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction by Lisa Robertson

  Objects The Skullcap

  The Gun

  The Cherry Ladder

  Two Bowls

  The Cigarette Holder

  Objects

  The Cribbage Board

  The Bone

  The Tuba

  The Cane

  The Frogs

  The Cameras

  Gadgets

  Rocks

  She wants to borrow my comb

  Horsehide

  Among Objects

  The Rattle

  Cups

  Umbrellas

  My Favourite Object

  Luck

  Food Toast

  Apples

  Tomatoes

  Picky Eaters

  Drumsticks

  Rajitas

  Pie

  Comics Food

  Potatoes

  Chicken

  Meatloaf

  Willy's Sandwiches

  Lunch at Duino

  Comfort Food

  Verde, Blanco, Rojo

  Sweet Tooth

  Ballpark Franks

  A Little Lunch

  Food Allergies

  What? Already?

  Salad

  Getting Old

  Rooms The Darkroom

  The Smallest Room

  Cloakrooms

  Drunk Tank

  Keats's Room

  Our Kitchen

  Greg's Studio

  My Study

  Living Defensively

  Makeup

  Elimination

  Waiting Room

  Classrooms

  Fitting Rooms

  The Principal's Office

  Stateroom

  The Cecil Pub

  Hotel Rooms

  The TV Room

  Locker Rooms

  Bixby's Room

  Roommates

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Button Kosmos

  Lisa Robertson

  George Bowering is writing Soft Zipper in Jalisco in a rented holiday apartment. He’s writing in the Vancouver condominium he shares with his wife Jean, in his triangular study. And he’s writing within and with the memory of other rooms, other spaces — the porch of his old rambling house in Kerrisdale, the artist Greg Curnoe’s Richmond Street studio in London Ontario, his mother’s kitchen table in Oliver B.C., his cherished ballpark, the Roman room John Keats died in. “Prose is a spatial experience” George said in a 1979 interview, and it’s clear in these pages that memory is too. The supple scale of space, from dresser drawer to American road trip, here folds and regroups the poet’s craft — for George’s prose is poet’s prose, with its joyous attention to the detail of syntax, the humour and mystery of juxtaposition, and the music of tone.

  Soft Zipper, a fragmented anti-memoir which organizes a lifetime of vignettes and recollections around a resolutely objective, rather than subjective point of view, borrows a structure, and subtitles — Objects, Food, Rooms — from American modernist Gertrude Stein’s 1914 volume Tender Buttons. What Stein discovered in writing her prose poems (also while on holiday, but in Spain), was that space is a synthetic perception. We compose it retrospectively with glimpses, borrowings, visual and musical rhymes and puns, and the staccato movement of our attention. In Tender Buttons the domestic detritus assembled by early Cubists in their still life collages finds its way across into her prose poems, and becomes there a plastic field of syntactic experiment, “the rhythm of the visible world” as she later explained. Where Stein’s ear is playfully abstract, or at least abstracting, George’s sound sense is vernacular, keyed to the plain pleasures of familiar speech. William Carlos Williams, rather than Eric Satie, would be a sonic predecessor. Prose is a domestic production here. His spaces too are often fabricated and fleshed out in accordance with the homely pleasure of touch. The feel of his father’s homemade felt skullcap in his hands is the first haptic foray, and soon after those same hands — in sweet homage to Stein — are plunged into a big glass bowl of buttons at his grandmother’s house. The writers’ hands remain present throughout this book, holding combs, baseballs, the remote control, reminding us also that this prose is made, and by hand too, at a table. It is a writing table, a long table, a deal table, an outdoor table, a kitchen table where cribbage or canasta is played, his old professor Warren Tallman’s mahogany table, and it is a rhythmic point of return: hands do something at a table repeatedly, usually with others. “How did he make it work” George asks of his father and his little skullcap. It is one of the questions we might bring as readers into his book.

  Our company in these pages is excellent. Charles Olson, Ornette Coleman, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes, George Oppen, Greg Curnoe: George slips his literary and artistic heroes and mentors into his texts casually, almost on the sly, much in the way that, as a professor, he’d carry extra books to the seminar table, fetish authors not on the syllabus. He’d teach the class without mentioning or presenting them to us, simply placing them a little rakishly in front of him, mysterious accessories to the topic at hand. We could read the spines if we stretched our necks. We learned to jot down those titles in our notebooks and follow up in the library. In this way we were tempted towards the books of Kristeva, Wittgenstein, Cixous. George’s oblique address wittily complicates Soft Zipper too. But here the prose itself, and its relationship to personal memory, relates less to the punned-upon Tender Buttons and its synthetic cubism than it does to the vocal patterns of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s 1932 memoir, with its soft hint of pastiche of a recently past era of domestic English. Stein played on her partner Alice Toklas’s voice with its wryly obsessive precision regarding the sensuality of household economics; in George’s book the homely diction delights in a word like “snazzy”, but it can also swerve meta-textually to Olson’s theoretical propositions on the body as object among objects. In Soft Zipper I’d say the voice is not far from his old seminar cadences— a light, cajoling, self-ironical performance of George Bowering the nationally lauded writer, George Bowering the voracious and careful and ever-curious reader, by George Bowering the scallywag boy from Oliver.

  I first studied Stein in George’s classroom at Simon Fraser University in 1986. Rereading now, I’m in the yellowing pages of the Van Vechten Selected with the Picasso portrait of Stein on the cover, which we used in his class. I kept the copy that George assigned as a course text for his undergrad seminar on modernist prose; my faint pencil underlining and occasional class notes are there on the brittle paper, joined now by several more decades of marginal reading marks. I recall reading Hemingway too for that class, and Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, always ignited by George’s infectiously enthusiastic curiosity — how does it work? How does the sentence work? What is the syntax doing? And again I am guided, as George has been too, by Stein, this time her essay “Composition as Explanation”, also on our syllabus back in 1986.

  In this lecture, written in 1925 at the car garage as she watched mechanics work on her old Ford, Stein makes three timely and still exciting discoveries about the composition of prose. Each is inherent to the texts in Soft Zipper — George has carried them into the time of his own composing. One is the continuous present, the next is beginning again, and the third is using everything. By means of these three techniques, which are deeply those of the bricoleur, the home mechanic, the homemaker, the writer stays within the consciousness of the manual and cognitive activity of
writing in real time. This is a conduct. In 1986 or 2006 or last week I underlined Stein’s words in pencil:

  Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted and that authentically speaking is composition. After life has been conducted in a certain way everybody knows it but nobody knows it, little by little, nobody knows it as long as nobody knows it. Any one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either, they are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, it makes their work compose as it does.

  The writer makes sentences that express the ongoing re-composition of language in relation to memory and experience. Memory and experience are in the present only: they too are compositions, moving syntheses of seized-upon fragments. And so their interleaving by means of the sentence creates that little bit of freshness or strangeness that lifts what can be said. Life, composition, text: a conduct.

  George said in an interview in 2007 “the sentence is what you want, the sentence that is very clear but mysterious at the same time.” This mystery is the kind that’s routinely observed at the writing table. It’s the abidingly common mystery of how we conduct ourselves— in the sentence, in the kitchen, in love — that reveals itself in the syntax only. We might consider conduct as another word for cosmology, where both of these are lodged firmly in the chaotic delight of everyday life, where the bashed-up tuba’s wounds add to the higher notes. Parts are observable, and parts occur on the sly. Order is made by combining the visible and invisible. Prose does present a cosmos, as does the baseball diamond or the radio or the skullcap decorated with astrology cut-outs or the mimeographed poetry zine —I think here of George’s old magazine Beaver Kosmos. Now you’re holding one of the commonplace mysteries of the composition of time in your hands.

  Objects

  In this (after all) conventional debate between science and subjectivity, I had arrived at this curious notion: why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each object? A mathesis singularis (and no longer universalis)?

  – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

  The Skullcap

  In the bottom of a drawer beside the bed in our condominium there is a piece of dusty old felt. Once in a while I give it a feel with my crooked fingers and I get a rush of dirty sweet feeling for my childhood curiosity. The thing is a folded skullcap with little shapes cut out of the felt –– stars, half-moons, planets, triangles. Every morning of my childhood and whenever I was home after that, I would see this soft blue half-ball on my father’s head, where it had the job of smoothing his tangled brown hair. One time I asked about this cap and he told me he had made it when he was a schoolboy, and so I knew why it was as small on his dome as a yarmulke, though of course I didn’t know what that was. Now here I am, a man quite a bit older than he ever got, and all these decades later I wonder about two things concerning my father the skullcap maker. How did he and his classmates, if he did this work in a class at school or at his church camp, make these perfect little astrology holes in the felt, and more important, how did he make it work as a cap on his head? Not a flat circle but half of a hollow ball? Over the years after I somehow acquired or inherited it –– I must have told my mother and brothers it was the only thing I wanted –– I would try it on, but though I habitually wear hats of one sort or the other, I have never worn this skullcap out of the house, and never for longer than a minute inside the house. Yet I have kept it since my father died half a century ago. I saw it just this morning, while I sat on the edge of the bed, my hair in an awful tangle.

  The Gun

  When I was in grade three I felt unarmed. All the boys had guns, or wished they had guns. I wished that I had a gun. The most popular game for boys was guns. Some of the time we played swords, so we all had skinned knuckles that made our mothers look up at the ceiling. A few years later, after my family moved into town, I had a famous sword that had been through innumerable battles. It had serious dents, but a lot of enemy swordsmen had lost their wooden blades in unfortunate challenges. But back when I was in grade three my parents somehow got wind of the fact that I pined for a gun. As far as I knew, the only way a boy could get a gun was in the form of a Christmas or birthday present. In the weeks previous to my eighth birthday I must have been ramping up the hints, walking around the house or outside, manouevering between apple trees, pointing at invisible adversaries with a crooked twig, and making that boy’s expulsive mouth sound that does not in the least resemble the report of a real revolver or automatic. On the first day of December, my birthday, in case you wanted to know, arrived, and yes, Georgie got his gun. I immediately performed my fictional thanks. Guns were supposed to be constructed of some metal, and came, if they were revolvers, in a belted holster, and if they were automatics they should have looked like the kind of steel that kidnappers and Nazis were afraid of. My gun was made of rather softish wood, a kind of squarish thing. When I pulled the trigger (you could not squeeze that item that was probably kept taut by a rubber band), it said click.

  The Cherry Ladder

  I was lucky. About the time I was old enough to work in the orchards, the aluminum ladders were replacing the heavier wooden ones. Before I got out of the fruit-picking profession, the Giraffes and little Gyrettes had appeared, to speed up the process or cut the orchardist’s labour expenses. These were the high-bucket machines that people now call cherry-pickers. People now say cherry-pick when they mean taking the individual item you fancy rather than gathering the whole shebang. That’s exactly the opposite of the way you pick cherries. Here is another way they have made the work quicker and less expensive for the orchardists: instead of nice big trees in rows with space to set a ladder, they crop short little semi-espaliered trees, so you can practically harvest your peaches or apples while standing on the ground. Or else they have yanked out all the fruit trees and replaced them with rows and rows of grape vines. Back in the time of real trees, apple-picking season would coincide with the first weeks of the school year. We boys would be told that if our grades were looking as if they would be good, we’d be let out of school to head for the orchards to make money. But I think we knew that fruit was relentless in its ripening, and the orchardists would be eager to find someone to get up those ladders. My father the school teacher spent the daylight hours of the summer in someone’s orchard. I could never keep up with him, but he gave me lots of advice so that I could try. The one I like best was that the safest rung to stand on is the top one, and he was right. When you are picking cherries, that is the top of a 24-foot ladder, and you have a long wire hook to pull down the supple cherry-loaded branches higher than that.

  Two Bowls

  I loved going to visit or stay with my grandfather and grandmother. They lived almost forty miles up the valley, and when I was really little, my grandfather was the postmaster up there. My grandmother was a good old-fashioned Baptist grandmother who was once named Clara Miller, can you imagine? I called him Grandpa and her Grandma. My mother’s father and stepmother we didn’t see so often. I called him Granddad and I don’t remember calling her anything. When I was a boy, say nine or eleven, pretty soon after arriving at their house behind the post office I would be into Grandma’s two big glass bowls, the button bowl and the picture bowl. The latter was filled with black and white photographs of everyone in the family from years ago right up to the present. I spent hours looking through those pictures, no matter how many times I had seen them. There was a picture of my grandparents with all their offspring, Llew, Grace, my father Ewart, Ella, Jack, Gerry, and Dorothy, who had died when I was a toddler. In this family picture my father had a bald head. Grandma told me, with simulated impatience, that as soon as he heard there was going to be a family picture, he went and shaved his head. I loved this because it was so unlike my dad, except that it was secretly just like him. I knew that my Baptist grandmother sort of liked it inside, and I wanted to be just like my dad. The other bowl was just as big and contained hundred
s and hundreds of buttons. I thought I must have a really big family that had been here for a long time. I loved to plunge my hand into the button bowl and let the buttons, all the colours and shapes and sizes of buttons, run between my fingers. I sorted them in rows and mixed them again. Sometimes I wish I had a big bowl of buttons.

  The Cigarette Holder

  I have mentioned my uncle Llew. Pronounced Lou. His whole name was Jabez Llewellyn Bowering, but he was usually called “Red.” He had a sign-painting business on Front Street, and a locally famous slogan: “Red’s signs are read.” Of course he had red hair, his wife Lorna from Seattle had red hair, and their son Russell had red hair. Uncle Red had a different mother from my dad’s, and he looked a lot different from Ewart and Ella and so on. Heck, I’ll mention that one year he was the underwater swimming champion of Seattle. They had an argumentative wire-haired terrier named Beans, who was mainly red-haired with white trim. It was at uncle Red’s that I heard my first World Series game on his grand radio with the names of foreign cities on the dial. Cubs versus Tigers. I became a Tigers fan. Next year I became a Red Sox fan, and so I have been ever since. Uncle Red, I thought, was kind of swashbuckling, in a kind of small town suspender-snapping way. I think I remember that he had a straw boater hat and two-tone shoes in the summer. I know for sure that he had a horn-rimmed cigarette holder. As a boy I swore that I would never smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, but I admired that snazzy cigarette holder. Tortoise shell? Uncle Red would often bite it so that it stuck upward, the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. In my grandparents’ house there were two big heavy-framed pictures my uncle Red had painted years earlier, while he was recovering from a serious back injury, one of a St. Bernard dog’s big face, and one of the stone house my grandparents raised their family in. I wish I knew where those paintings went, but I wish I had uncle Red’s tortoise shell cigarette holder.