Although the constitutional reforms of the nineties failed to define Quebec as having a distinct culture in Canada, the term still resonates. Unlike the other provincial parliaments, the Quebec equivalent is called l’Assemblée nationale and Quebec is referred to as a nation within Canada by the federal parliament. A more nuanced analysis would enumerate other points of difference, but in a largely English speaking continent, Quebec’s distinctiveness and nationhood depends largely on the French language. For me francisation is a question of integration; for Quebec, it is a question of cultural survival.

With such high stakes it is easy to understand why Quebeckers are easily alarmed by the encroachment of English on other totems of Quebec culture. This week it is the discovery that an energy conference hosted by Hydro-Quebec, the government-owned utility which keeps winter at bay through much of the northeastern seaboard, will be in English only. Just as worrisome is that the monoglot head of the Dejardins group, the world’s largest credit union, cannot express solidarity in the mother tongue of most his fellow members, the majority of whom live in Quebec. (“Mutual” and “solidarity”, of course, do not exist in either Anglo-Saxon or the Anglo-Saxon business model.) Most alarming though is the arrival of the monolingual Randy Cunneyworth as coach to the Montreal Canadiens, a scandal presumably on the grounds that it is better to lose the Stanley Cup than lose the right to tell the coach exactly what he did wrong. So that he may better hear what he is supposed to have done, it is understood that Mr Cunneyworth is being francisized.

These questions of personnel may seem laughable. They are not because one exception gives way to another and a functioning, self-respecting Canadian society needs, among other things, electricity, well-managed financial institutions and a hockey team. Anything less would be to have distinctiveness rest on inadequacy

But far more important than the occupants of the boardroom or the bench is what takes place in the heads of bilingual French and English speakers. With French and English having so many similarities – one joke being that English is just bad French – and Quebec being far closer to the English-speaking world than, say, France, it is inevitable that there is a high traffic through whatever permeable membrane exists between the two languages. This means that while “OK” is rarely heard in Paris, where “d’accord” reigns, it is normal in Montreal. My separatist translator friend Luc told me as we sped through the Laurentians that while a Frenchman will automatically francisise Manchester, his fellow francophone in Montreal won’t; Manchester, New Hampshire is too close not to be familiar. The same goes for many other English place and family names, some of which even append to unilingual French-speakers.

But I do not think that this difference between France and Quebec signifies the corruption of the last redoubt of la francophonie in North America by an consuming English. Rather it is the consequence of large numbers of French and English speakers experiencing the delirium of speaking two closely related languages. As a student here in the 90s, I remember one teacher, a Boston-native, who more than once in his classes on the history of the English language would look inward for a moment before asking “Qu’est-ce que c’est en anglais?” In Paris, English speakers more regularly register their files than save them, reaching for the nearest cognate to the “Enregister” blinking on their computer screen. So it is hardly surprising that French speakers might need reminding French délai is not the same as English delay. Fortunately for them, the linguistic advisor Camil Chouinard is on hand with his 1500 pièges du français:

DÉLAI n’est pas synonyme de retard. Il faut retenir que DÉLAI peut vouloir dire deux choses : (1) les temps accordé pour faire quelque chose et (2) la prolongation accordée pour faire quelque chose.

To me, it is in this confusion of languages that the distinctiveness of Quebec culture lies. It makes one alert, to an almost hyper-sensitive degree, of the influence on and relation to of one language to another. Words accrue more meaning than one language can sustain and there are times when after speaking French for a while and returning to English, I find myself speaking English as if through the veil of French. I derange you? Quite possibly, yes. But look at how clearly French makes the relation between naming and magic with appeler (to call, shading into appeal) and épeler (to spell), how plaire makes clear the relation of please to pleasure. My inability to actually spell words such as apartment without hesitating, or indeed making a number of attempts, seems to me a small price to pay for this richness.

This confusion is seen through the eyes of twenty-six year old Alec, his wife, Polina, and his father, Samuil, when three generations of the Krasnansky family undertake a similar journey. Chicago is their intended destination, but plans are upset. On the basis of the Montreal Olympics and footage of the 1972 hockey games with the Soviet Union, they choose Canada from the menu of promised lands. “Stateless and directionless,” they await the pronouncements of officials, chiefly on the health of the family patriarch. Technically, they may be in Rome. Actually, they have been cast into the purgatory of migration where the normal prepositional certainty of “in”, “out,” and “across” is suspended. In short, they are neither here nor there and have only memory and motive to contemplate.

It is possible that Alec’s brother Karl, the prime mover in more than one sense, might give a straightforward answer to why the Krasnanskys are moving – the flashbacks to Latvia offer no reason for flight other than the sheer weight of history and the boredom of the radio factory. A pragmatist though, Karl only lifts a finger when he see a profit and is only available to readers through the book’s three main characters.They are much less certain about the move, at times expressing indifference to their fate. This makes for a richly ironic, if largely plotless novel, in which the Krasnanskys come to terms with their decisions while Soviet Jewry bickers and suns itself on an Italian beach which in Samuil’s eyes may as well be on the Baltic.

Samuil’s usual view of his fellow travelers is not so benevolent and it is Bezmozgis’ skill to produce characters in which wild contradictions are plausible. A fervent member of the Party who saw his father killed by White Russians, Samuil believes “the Soviets had wisely managed to rid themselves of the least desirable elements.” Now that he has been bounced into giving up the privileges of a Party official by his sons, he finds himself entering Rome by bus sat beside those same elements. “In his long life he had never had the misfortune of being cast among such a lot of rude and unpleasant people.” His family fair little better. When his wife makes a comparison between emigration and earlier evacuations he demands, “In the war you ran from from the enemy. Who are you running from now?” he demands.

While Samuil’s existence may be the same wherever the Krasnanskys go, it is Polina who feels the collapse of “here” and “there” into hazy purgatory most. In Vienna, she is afraid to enter the shops in case she damaged clothes of unimaginable colors. In Rome, she is afraid to cross the street. More than dislocation though, Polina is aware of what can be lost in migration. “Wherever we go, we shall be among strangers,” she writes in the coded letters to her sister back in Riga. Later she worries that entry to the free world might come at the cost of passing through “life like a knife through smoke”.

Skipping around the worries of his wife and father like a boy with butterfly net is Alec. He is reasonably clear on his motive for emigration, “More freedom for bumbling”. On account of his gregariousness no one is surprised to see him where he does not belong. Oblivious to the feelings of others – it’s not just butterflies he catches in his net – Alec nevertheless is the source of much of the novel’s warmth and he adds levity to the bitterness of Samuil and the sense of loss felt by Polina.

Bezmozgis is helped in this by his three main characters, all of whom are keen observers of their surroundings and the Soviet Jewry that roil around the them: the family who smuggle jewels in a deliberate corpulence and ask for medical assistance for their removal; Josef Roidman, a frustrated librettist, also bound for Canada, who believes that Pierre Trudeau’s greatest concern is “what to do about Quebec and what to do with Josef Roidman”; and Lyova, an émigré of two utopias, the Soviet Union and Israel, who now simply seeks the country with the fewest parades.

In the hands of other writers these stories might have overwhelmed more serious aspects of his novel. Instead, Bezmozgis’ pithy sketches add to the sense of loss felt by his three distinct characters. In this, The Free World, is largely Alec’s novel: a comic revue, but not one without tragedy or wisdom.

In 2009 I saw Paris under snow. It never snows in Paris, or at least that’s what they say every year. Nevertheless, I left it on what would be the last Eurostar of the year, hightailing it to the Scottish Highlands for the holidays as lines of communication south shut down behind me.

It's snowing in Paris! Late December 2009

The following year, for the first time in my adult life, I was spared the anxiety of cancelled trains and the slippery chaos of Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, Christmas Day in the family fastness being a mere 40 minutes away by car.

The view from the fastness. Christmas Day 2010.

This year I have exchanged the Highlands for Montreal, where, in contrast to Paris, snow is expected in abundance, and, unlike Scotland, at temperatures which plunge preciptiously below freezing point. I believe we have touched minus 26 so far, but are currently bouncing between zero and ten below.

Montreal in mid-December 2011.

While winter looms large in Canadian consciousness – Margaret Atwood wrote that “There is a sense in Canadian literature that the true and only season here is winter,” anything else is distrusted; Adam Gopnik’s recently delivered CBC Massey Lectures on the topic is a bestseller – the sheer ecstasy of a Montreal winter, implied by temperatures so many degrees below and winds of so many kilometres per hour, is in my reading best captured in Nabokov’s description of St Petersburg.

[T]he pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye; the sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung; the brightly coloured bunch of toy-balloons hawked by an aproned pedlar; the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of powdery frost; the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined white; the rasp and twinkle of winter traffic… and by the way how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard (like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for the moment) to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight , self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees — on this painted photograph — a dream-wide street with droshkies all awry under incredibly blue skies, which farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality.

The manure may have left Montreal, as I presume it has the Nevsky Prospect, but Montreal driving is discussed with despair by those who can get on to the island and exhilaration by those who see no reason to get off – road infrastructure at the moment being more inference than structure. Still, dream-wide streets circle a mountain covered in dazzling white.

Nabokov though, I discovered, is not the original of this account. Inspired by the winter and newly enrolled at Atwater Library, I am reading Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. There, as the narrator, Nikolai Irtenev, prepares to enter youth and Moscow University, he speaks of late winter turning to spring:

Not a clot of snow was now to be seen in the streets, and the dirty slush had given place to wet, shining pavements and coursing rivulets. The last icicles on the roof were fast melting in the sunshine, buds were swelling on the trees in the little garden, the path leading across the courtyard to the stables were soft instead of being a frozen ridge of mud, and mossy grass was showing green between the stones around the entrance-steps. It was just that particular time when the season exercises the strongest influence upon the human soul – when clear sunlight illuminates everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under one’s feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when the bright blue sky is streaked with long transparent clouds.

For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the birth of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive in a great town that in country. One sees less, but feels more.

In fact, Nikolai sees as well as feels, and as well as keeping a close eye on the seasons, he is he is a keen observer of the complexities of the aristocratic society of which he is a member. He himself becomes conscious of his powers of observation and their implications of earlier in the novel with his second journey to Moscow.

For the first time in my life, I then envisaged the idea that we – i.e. our family – were not the only persons in the world; that not every conceivable interest was centred on ourselves; and that there existed numbers of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, and even knew nothing of our existence … As I gazed at the towns and villages through which we passed, and in each house of which lived at least one family, as well as the women and children who stared with curiosity at our carriages and then became lost to sight for ever, and the peasants and workmen who did not even look at us, much less make us any obeisance, the question arose for the first time in my thoughts, “Whom else do they care for if not for us?” And this question was followed by others, such as “To what end do they live?” “How do they educate their children and let them play? What are their names?” and so forth?

This concern with individuals outside his social class is actually somewhat limited but, convinced of his own ugliness and overshadowed by the accomplishments of his elder brother, he has ample opportunity to watch and listen to the goings on in the drawing rooms of Moscow. This is great fun, not least because his powers of observation are not so acute when it comes to himself. It is not in spite of, but because of his insecurities that he earns a nickname, “the diplomat,” and is described by one matriarch as “a monster of perfection”. The ironic voice of the narrator alerts us to the tragic possibility of such a success and one of the reasons for reading the book is the ease with which it moves from one perspective to another.

Where the peasants do feature is in the endless rules that the Nikolai creates for himself, codes for living by which he will be at once virtuous and a social success, these two aims rarely being compatible. He will give regularly and anonymously is one. Another is to pray and live simply. Prayer may be possible, even expected, in the top echelons of Russian society, but to live simply is demand the impossible. Nikolai, of course fails, tripped up by both self-imposed stays and youthful impulsiveness. Where his rules do succeed is in their alliance with his observation of others and if ever you need to know what was cool, or comme il faut, and what howlingly not in Moscow circa 1850, then Nikolai’s your man.

As his struggles are at once both entertaining and instructive they inform my new year’s resolutions. Firstly, to observe others more closely in the hope that if I am not kinder or more successful, I am at least better amused (which may in itself be mistaken for patience). Secondly, not to tie myself in knots over endless rules of my own making. Finally, to finish what has been started for in that hurly burly much has been left in disarray and one of Nikolai’s bitterest regrets is to say je fus un homme très comme il faut.

Running through the birch trees of Angrignon Park pursued by a Romanov complex. December 2011.

Overwhelmed by the schmaltz pouring from the radio, it is my normal habit to retreat to my room and examine the contents of the Bag of Tat. Last mentioned during the crazed pursuit of Battenburg cake in the Inverness branch of Marks & Spencer – to better celebrate the royal wedding, you understand – the Bag of Tat is kind of oubliette in which are desposited the documents of our a collapsing civilization.  It should be said that the bag of tat is a kind of grand guignol that is best approached with equanimity provided by the first sip of the second gin. With Atlantic preventing examination, the oubliette will have to be investigated contrarily and from memory.

In it may be found the edition of OK! which previewed the funeral of Jade Goody. (The horror  was signalled on its cover which dryly informed the reader that this was edition number 666.) Alongside this are images, torn from The Face circa 1995,  of celebrities enacting their own demise through the lens of David LaChapelle, in whose direction the opera of terrorism reached its fullest expression. Other gems include a postcard on which is depicted a snowbound a Air France liner as the rescue team ascends the stairs, their success unknown and unmatched by their ability to evoke the glamour of a late 60s Mossad strike.

Since these early images were gathered, some kind of event horizon has been passed. That this was confirmed in August in the window of a Subway outlet in Manchester was only fitting. Blink now and you will miss the replacing of democratically elected governments with former Goldman Sachs executives, the ousted politicians attempting to relaunch their former careers in the music industry. We can only await the day that Berlusconi, upping the ante with Beiber and Bulbé, not only appears with but sings with A.C. Milan. Until that comes to pass there is a delightful Tumblr feed of Kim Jong-Il looking at things, and as I don’t want you weeping at the feast, knuckles whitening around an ill-advised third gin, I leave you with the the merriest greetings from the Bag of Tat and its most festive document.

Can't see the city for the trees?

Driving downtown, my friend said I was like a kid.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Canada’s my new toy. Let’s see if I can break it.”

Welcome to my mind. A place in which the swing from delighted glee to panicked terror is but a sentence away. Such is the anxiety that I wake with headaches make me believe I have slept with my head in nothing less than a vice. But this is normal, I tell myself. It happened when I moved to Paris. It happened to my Canadian friends, whose move I am doing in reverse.

The companions of panic and glee are error and inertia. There is much paperwork to be done and many priorities to juggle, but where to start? Paralysis is the easy, if agonizing, option. Its agonies might just lead to panicked acton. In my terror I may sell myself short, pursuing minimum wage jobs when the jobs I have been expensively trained for are available and hiring. Equally, in my glee I may over commit and, for example, take an apartment simply because it is available, clearly part of the long term plan, but for which I am not yet ready. Both hasty panic and gleeful ecstasy are likely to lead to situations which I might repent at leisure. After all, pitching up on the national doorstep and declaring “Take me now!” could easily be misunderstood, even if that doorstep is as welcoming as Canada’s.

And yet things, overwhelming as they are, must be done. The trick to managing this is, of course, is to keep breathing, often deeply. Quickly establishing a routine has also been helpful. This has not always been the case and in the recent past far from managing these wild mood swings, I would forget the obvious and spend hours before sleeping surfing job and property rental sites on my phone before collapsing into the morass of pseudo-medical or productivity websites that make up the bulk of the internet that is not pornography. This was clearly self-defeating, not least as this was in the limbo land prior to arrival when very little can be achieved.

Although I was clearly breathing and in its way it was routine, it achieved nothing. Writing has taken on a new and sustaining purpose as a constant in my life. With this one seemingly irrelevant goal in place (irrelevant as in the short term it will not result in a job or an apartment) the habit of seeing the overwhelming as a series of steps becomes easier and fruitless habits of thought broken. The research also provides, albeit by accident, advice not to dissimilar to those pseudo-medical-cum-productivity sites.

Good health, believe me, is mainly in your own hands. Most of our ailments take their rise in the mind, and you will find your work less laborious if you arrange your studies on some rational plan. Your library, your letters, all your notes should be arranged in definite places; and do not be carried away first into one author and then another, but take in had one good book at a time and do not abandon it until you have finished it, making notes as you go along of the things that seem worth remembering. Lay down for yourself some definite course of life, deciding what you wish to do as what time of day. Do not pile one task on another until the earlier one is finished; thus you will make the day seem longer, which is now almost entirely wasted. And since you complain of your memory, I think you may find it useful to set up a kind of journal for each year (it does not take much trouble), and enter in it briefly day by day anything that happens which you would not wish to forget. I know some people who have profited greatly from the time spent on this, among them that distinguished man François de Busleyden archbishop of Besançon.

But above all I urge you to learn in the conduct of business to follow judgement rather than impulse. If there is anything you do not like, look at once to see if you can put it right or if the wrong can be made less; and you will see this more clearly in tranquility than if you are upset. If anything can be done, do it; if not, what pray is the use of indignation or laments, except to make things twice as bad with only yourself to thank? I beg you in the name of our friendship, consider your life and health more important than anything. If you can maintain your position in life without harming them, by all means do so; but if not, it is false economy to keep one’s possessions in tact and to lose one’s peace of mind. Above all, if you have too little concern for yourself, mind you do not prove the undoing of someone else as well; for I shall no regard myself as safe and sound unless you are so too, whom I reckon (as I hope for the love of God) the better part of me. Do not spend too much time on things of no account. Youth speeds by, health can break like glass; they must not be squandered. Some things one ought to look down on, and raise one’s spirit to the big things. Seneca and Plato – make them your familiar friends; if you converse with them often, they will not let your spirit down. A truly great spirit should overlook some wrongs done to it, and to some men’s calumnies have neither ears to hear nor tongue to reply. Make the experiment sometimes: discover how much more compliance and intelligent courtesy can do than a spirit headstrong and wayward.

(Erasmus to Pieter Gillis, 6 October 1516)

He was there at the offices of RAMQ, causing a moment’s confusion when the date of leaving the scheme did not match with the date of physical departure from Canadian soil. My eighteenth birthday was the explanation.

The next day, at Service Canada, I filled in the gaps for a government that wanted to know “What have you been doing all this time?” This and that, studying and working. I’ve been here and there, prevaricating over the decision that brought me here. I spent a lot of time on the Immigration Canada website, but that was before Facebook.

“And now that you’re here?”

Well now, I can teach and I can write. For the rest, it remains to be seen.

Things to look forward to in 2012: former Greek prime minister hopes to revive Greek exports by covering “The White Rose of Athens”; with the French socialists in disarray, Sarkozy’s time is limited, nevertheless he does manage to squeeze in time to record backing vocals for Carla; following market testing throughout 2011, Household Management with Angela, is launched as a chat show in which nothing is resolved and is broadcast live from the European Commission, the ECB, and the Bundestag.

We can only hope that these are not overshadowed by the revelation in wikiLeaks v 3.1 that the membership of the Chinese Politburo and the Board of Goldman is identical and that public appearances often involve the use of Mission Impossible-style prosthetics.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/22/berlusconi-cruise-ship-songs-ballads-true-love-album-politician-italy-italian_n_1107891.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

A waste of pepper spray, not to say police time at UC Davis. Image: via SF Chronicle via YouTube.

As students marched through London earlier this month to protest the increase in tuition fees to £9,000 per year, I was in Edinburgh working on their sixteenth-century predecessors. Given the difficulties of funding higher education in the twenty-first century and in the belief that history is instructive, the following suggestions can be made.

1. Instead of forcing students to have recourse to usury, which is known to have a deleterious effect on the national finances and the moral fiber of both borrower and lender, vice-chancellors should have the authority to issue begging licenses to their students. Once issued, students will be permitted to wander the countryside in pairs seeking what charitable succour they can.

2. If a student is found without such a license, he or she should be receive the same treatment as any other vagrant and be whipped, branded, or have his or her ears removed. This last would represent a considerable saving on the perceived need for plastic bullets in London or the actual use of pepper spray seen this week at the University of California, Davis. These are single use solutions; a knife is not only handily reusable, but allows repeated cuts in students’ education, and to the very bone.

3. In his Register of the University of Oxford (1887), Andrew Clarke finds it very difficult to calculate the fees paid for degrees in the sixteenth century; the differing fees for lectures, tutorials, accommodation in college etc make buying a calling plan look simple, but the sliding scale makes a frequent appearance. It is based on rank and for one category of fees looks as follows:

• Sons of princes, dukes or marquises: 13s 4d
• Sons of counts and viscounts: 10s 0d
• Sons of barons, bishops, or baronets: 6s, 8d
• Sons of knights, other officers, and archdeacons: 3s 4d
• Sons of squires: 1s 8d
• Sons of nobles, by which we might understand, property owners: 1s 0d

As a concession to an age in which such titles are infrequent, it would surely be a simple thing to harness the information provided annually on tax returns and introduce a similar scale based on, say, parental income or wealth. After all, we don’t want give up five hundred years of progress.

Link to The White Castle on Amazon.co.uk

Erasmus filling out a funding application. Image: Albrecht Durer (1526), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It is a routine part of academic life to seek funding for research. For the early modern scholar things were little different with the result that education did not appear to be the route to riches that a drunken lord, imagined by Richard Pace, might wish for his son.

‘… Scholars are a bunch of beggars. Even Erasmus is a pauper, and I hear he’s the smartest of them all … God damn it, I’d rather see my son hanged than be a student. Sons of the nobility ought to blow the horn properly, hunt like experts, and train and carry a hawk gracefully. Studies, by God, ought to be left to country boys.
(Richard Pace, The Benefit of a Liberal Education, 1518)

But scholars then, just as now, held themselves in high regard and Erasmus took umbrage at his role in this caricature of aristocratic disdain for academic study. The result was this contradictory (and unsuccessful) bid for funds from Henry VIII to keep him in the libraries of Europe and out of its classrooms.

… you immortalized me as disgracefully poor, though I seemed to myself a sort of Midas. But some of the odium of this belongs to my patrons, unless you think I am an idle dependent of whom they are right to have had enough. But now, since you have caricatured me in your book let me have your help in removing this reproach. Prod those benefactors with all of whom, and rightly, you have so much influence. Especially now, when I have an immensely long journey to support, please do what you can to secure the success of an appeal that is now before the king, whom I have so often wooed in vain. Bring in, if you need them, Mountjoy and Tunstall. Colet has been busy on this for some time. What I need is ready money.
(Erasmus to Pace,  5 March 1518)