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Colin’s Big Thing
The first chapters of Bruce Serafin's Colin's Big Thing (Ekstasis $21.95) recall his assimilation of B.C. culture-rural and urban, raw and sophisticated. He experiences the pulp mill town with its simmering violence, the elite high school in the British Properties, the remote logging camp, the hippie era of Vancouver in the Sixties, and finally the university English class. The young Serafin is creative and talented, and by his 20s he has amassed a rich store of material for the stuff of fiction. With an ear for racy speech and a talent for rendering character through dialogue, he seems to be headed towards a career as a man of letters. A conversation with his high school friend Alistair Fraser at the end of the first section predicts his future:
"Bruce,"; he said, "Our road is failure.";
"Failure. It sounds bad,"; I said.
"It'll lead us to grace.";
"It'll lead you to grace.";
"You, too. You too, man.";
Serafin concludes the exchange by noting, "It didn't lead me to grace. It led me to the post office."; Serafin becomes a letter sorter by taking a job at the Vancouver post office where he remains for much of his working life. Serafin works on the graveyard shift, which he describes as a kind of underworld, in which armies of men and women toil in dehumanizing and degrading circumstances. Their efforts preserve a safe and clean world for those who produce letters, all the while remaining insulated from the conditions that make their world safe and clean. Thus the post office functions as a metaphor for the author's feelings about his relationship to the literary world. Serafin's choice of postal work can been viewed as a gesture of renunciation. What he rejects is a literary "career"; characterized by competitiveness and pretentiousness, out of touch with ordinary people, and highly derivative. A literary journal for which he wrote in high school was marred by a plagiarized story, while his own story, "Sonny's Blues,"; was stolen from James Baldwin. That early sense of the writer's derivativeness is reinforced by his later contacts with writers.
Serafin's admiration for a group of Vancouver poets is soured by the exclusiveness of their small circle, and by their slavish imitation of ideas and forms imported from elsewhere. His resistance to the literary world is his way of achieving a state of grace. Eventually Serafin finds peace in his work. His depiction of the interaction of the wide range of eccentric, alienated and heroic characters in the post office is the most compelling part of the book.
Serafin locates one possibility for honest artistic expression in the production of the alternative comic book-a medium that is minimalist, stripped of metaphor, and more visual than verbal. He was alerted to the possibilities of the comic book as art by high school friend Alistair Fraser, a photographer, who absorbed people's stories and combined the pictures and stories into a comic strip about Mrs. Nemo, a welfare mom with five kids. Fraser's promise as an artist ended when he died at the age of 21 in a car driven by a drunken friend. Fraser's life and work foreshadows that of the eponymous Colin Upton whom Serafin meets later in life. Upton articulates his artistic credo in the following words:
"The material in mainstream American comics is so fatuous, so lacking in any real story, that you have to work hard to keep up your interest. Most of the independents I know are into storytelling-they don't have the flashy effects. I think that this has a lot to do with the influence of punk rock in Vancouver. Its influence has been huge here. With alternative comics, like alternative music, you have to SAY something. This makes it more relevant to Generation X and younger people. There's a desire for less ambiguity-so many things in modern society disguise their real message. So younger people now, their idea is, 'If you want to say something, TELL ME, don't hide it in metaphors or incomprehensible imagery that I can't understand.' I don't think this means people are ignorant. It's just that their knowledge is not about Keats.";
One evening, Serafin, unobserved, spots Colin moving alone through a crowded street. He seems to personify the zeitgeist of the Vancouver Serafin knew as a young man, a "distillate of the fantastic city that I see in my dreams, a kind of compound of fog and rain and grey and darker grey clouds."; At the same time Serafin is reminded of Alistair Fraser's presence in that fantastic city, walking through it as "ragged nobleman, with an expression of pitying contempt on his face."; Gradually during his years at the post office, Serafin's urge to publish reasserts itself. His essays and reviews appear in journals and newspapers, and from 1990 to 1997 he edits and publishes the Vancouver Review. Finally he produces this memoir, his first book. Its aim is one expressed by Colin Upton who said, "I want to produce a record of the Vancouver I know before it disappears forever."; Serafin amply fulfills that goal. 1-894800-26-5
--by Joan Givner
[BCBW 2004] "Biography"
"Bruce,"; he said, "Our road is failure.";
"Failure. It sounds bad,"; I said.
"It'll lead us to grace.";
"It'll lead you to grace.";
"You, too. You too, man.";
Serafin concludes the exchange by noting, "It didn't lead me to grace. It led me to the post office."; Serafin becomes a letter sorter by taking a job at the Vancouver post office where he remains for much of his working life. Serafin works on the graveyard shift, which he describes as a kind of underworld, in which armies of men and women toil in dehumanizing and degrading circumstances. Their efforts preserve a safe and clean world for those who produce letters, all the while remaining insulated from the conditions that make their world safe and clean. Thus the post office functions as a metaphor for the author's feelings about his relationship to the literary world. Serafin's choice of postal work can been viewed as a gesture of renunciation. What he rejects is a literary "career"; characterized by competitiveness and pretentiousness, out of touch with ordinary people, and highly derivative. A literary journal for which he wrote in high school was marred by a plagiarized story, while his own story, "Sonny's Blues,"; was stolen from James Baldwin. That early sense of the writer's derivativeness is reinforced by his later contacts with writers.
Serafin's admiration for a group of Vancouver poets is soured by the exclusiveness of their small circle, and by their slavish imitation of ideas and forms imported from elsewhere. His resistance to the literary world is his way of achieving a state of grace. Eventually Serafin finds peace in his work. His depiction of the interaction of the wide range of eccentric, alienated and heroic characters in the post office is the most compelling part of the book.
Serafin locates one possibility for honest artistic expression in the production of the alternative comic book-a medium that is minimalist, stripped of metaphor, and more visual than verbal. He was alerted to the possibilities of the comic book as art by high school friend Alistair Fraser, a photographer, who absorbed people's stories and combined the pictures and stories into a comic strip about Mrs. Nemo, a welfare mom with five kids. Fraser's promise as an artist ended when he died at the age of 21 in a car driven by a drunken friend. Fraser's life and work foreshadows that of the eponymous Colin Upton whom Serafin meets later in life. Upton articulates his artistic credo in the following words:
"The material in mainstream American comics is so fatuous, so lacking in any real story, that you have to work hard to keep up your interest. Most of the independents I know are into storytelling-they don't have the flashy effects. I think that this has a lot to do with the influence of punk rock in Vancouver. Its influence has been huge here. With alternative comics, like alternative music, you have to SAY something. This makes it more relevant to Generation X and younger people. There's a desire for less ambiguity-so many things in modern society disguise their real message. So younger people now, their idea is, 'If you want to say something, TELL ME, don't hide it in metaphors or incomprehensible imagery that I can't understand.' I don't think this means people are ignorant. It's just that their knowledge is not about Keats.";
One evening, Serafin, unobserved, spots Colin moving alone through a crowded street. He seems to personify the zeitgeist of the Vancouver Serafin knew as a young man, a "distillate of the fantastic city that I see in my dreams, a kind of compound of fog and rain and grey and darker grey clouds."; At the same time Serafin is reminded of Alistair Fraser's presence in that fantastic city, walking through it as "ragged nobleman, with an expression of pitying contempt on his face."; Gradually during his years at the post office, Serafin's urge to publish reasserts itself. His essays and reviews appear in journals and newspapers, and from 1990 to 1997 he edits and publishes the Vancouver Review. Finally he produces this memoir, his first book. Its aim is one expressed by Colin Upton who said, "I want to produce a record of the Vancouver I know before it disappears forever."; Serafin amply fulfills that goal. 1-894800-26-5
--by Joan Givner
[BCBW 2004] "Biography"
Submitted on April 17, 2008 in By David.
