Even from the vantage point of Montreal, Quebec City is a city marked by its old-world charm. You notice it first in the buildings, then realize they’ve helped the people continue living in the same relaxed atmosphere of seemingly simpler yet far less homogenous times. The fiction, poetry and articles in La Muse Gueule are infused with this sensibility, and with an awareness of its preciousness vis-a-vis the ongoing march of time. It’s an enjoyable, varied read: Denis Doucet writes of time stopping when a elderly homeless woman takes a dump on a sidewalk; Francois Tremblay appreciates John Coltrane and eulogizes Ginsberg and Burroughs, and Christian Tremblay defends a soon-to-be-demolished set of old buildings while providing comic relief in his several strips. Editor Paul Wood’s feature article is the meaty morsel in this mix, though. “En Amont, comme en aval” (“Downstream, as it was upstream”) recalls Thoreau’s impression that Canada was an old world country where the Middle Ages still existed (and worked, to boot). In Quebec this impression lingered up until the nationalistic (yet ultimately economic) fervour of the 60s, when Rene Levesque insisted that “we cannot survive in this 20th century as a province of peasants.” This statement spurred on the mass shedding of the past in Quebec, a shedding seen in every Canadian urban center in the ensuing skyscraper-building mid-60s. Wood points out that Thoreau observed this “shaking off of the rust” back in the 1850s and noted even then that it could only set back any true development. For Wood, the irony is that our clinging to long-rusted forms of government has resulted in the bright shining copper rooves in our old quarters being shaken off with the rust. The touristification of the old sectors carried out under guise of “preservation” by municipal governments is justly reviled by Wood as being simply the latest insult to our still-durable (yet tenuous) past. Ironically, in many cases the old quarters are being rented by the only people who could afford their renovation: high-tech and multimedia firms, who generally gut the detailed interiors and replace them with shiny flat surfaces. This especially saddens me after experiencing the beautiful ice storm in Montreal, when nearly everything vaguely modern ceased to function. Largely thanks to the (old) way our buildings and streets were planned, we were able to step right back into the 1800s for over a week. As we had no choice, we practiced the old ways and found them to be more durable, more dependable, and certainly more satisfying and graceful than pushing buttons & watching screens. Wood rightly laments the relegation of the old quarters to “polished facades for the delight of tourists with eyes shielded by disposable cameras” – I can now tell you from experience that if we still lived in these areas as we once did, instead of just visited them or worked in them, we would re-learn a way of life which is far from irrelevant in these pre-millenial times. As we learned during the ice storm, our modern age, more than any other, is extremely prone to becoming obsolete in an instant. And yet, our more durable past is rapidly fading. As Wood concludes, and as Thoreau noticed even back then, our unique old heritage makes us “rare as hell.” (LR)
french, lit-zine / main creator: Paul Wood (editor) / $2 / 227 de la Reine, Quebec City, QC G1K 2R1