Just Between Us

Melanie Kobayashi has a long pointer with a sharp end in case anyone in the audience at the Baron Gallery gets out of hand. It’s a joke and yet there’s a weird resonance to the story of Kobayashi’s process and the mostly internal obstacles she’s had to overcome—again and again.

The big one she names is “guilt”, which takes the form of ideas about art she encountered in her studies at the University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, and two weeks at Emily Carr. Her Powerpoint charts the on-going arguments between figurative and conceptual, material and idea, paint and installation. She reminds us of how confusing it was to be in art schools in the 1980s. 

And how exciting. 

It is through this constant and tumultuous back and forth that Kobayashi came to her present way of painting.

A well-known Canadian author and I were walking into an event at the 2010 Vancouver International Writers Festival. She was trying to identify what she felt was different about the festival that year. The publishers, she said, seemed out of sorts somehow.

I pointed to the Kobo tent, where a long line of people waited to put their names in a box to win a free eReader.

“Do you think that has anything to do with it?” I said.

We looked at each other and shrugged.

Once we were seated inside, the moderator announced a draw for a free Kobo. He made a few uneasy jokes about the disappearance of books. Kobo was one of the sponsors of the festival.

The price war between what was then Canadian-owned Kobo and Amazon’s Kindle had begun earlier that year.

As with many of the books that shaped my life, I encountered the work of Adrienne Rich outside of college classrooms. In fact it was a friend who first handed me Rich’s Diving into the Wreck in 1973 at Left Bank Books, the St. Louis bookstore she now owns, when it was still on Delmar Boulevard.

Adrienne Rich is one of the through-lines in my life. I have carried her books with me across continents, boxed and unboxed them, added each new published volume to the worn copies of her previous books, reached for them on bad nights when the world seemed no longer viable. Her work entered my mind at such a depth, with such consistency, that it became part of my own history.

Twenty-one-year-old Nadeem Abdel-Gawad hopes to attend his graduation ceremony at the American University in Cairo next month. But that depends on what happens in Tahrir Square this week.

On Monday, when we spoke via Skype, he described how it felt this time last year to be part of the uprising that ousted then-president Hosni Mubarak.