In the midst of life, we are in debt, etc

An Open Letter to Jonathan Franzen

2012-01-20T21:42:00.015-05:00

Jonathan,
It looks like all this is coming up again. Jodi's smartly staying out of this one, it seems, but Jennifer Weiner is being both logical and hilarious about the whole thing. Of course your name is coming up. Your name is front and centre because you're now the boy everyone loves to hate. Even the boys hate you^*, for being so ubiquitous, for being the projected Great American Novelist, for being so successful based on one (in my opinion) really great book. That book, of course, was not Freedom. Maybe your picture is on the dart-board because you failed to deliver?

When I wrote my letter to Jodi Picoult, I said this:

So maybe I just don't know enough of your work. But have you read Franzen? He's really, really good. So is Lethem. Some of the Wonderboys the NYT loves aren't all that, but those two? They kinda are. You are not now and will never be in the same league.

While she is still horrible, I no longer feel like calling you great. You got all the attention and the hype and the Time cover, and I admit, I was really, really excited about Freedom. But boy-o, you sure let me down.

I've steered people away from Freedom. People who only marginally liked The Corrections I've told that they won't see anything better with your follow up. Those who liked The Corrections I've warned that Freedom is a great big comedown. I had a post half-written about it, but it stuck in the queue for a long, long time. Finally, I deleted it. Perhaps I shouldn't have, so I could now expound the ways in which Freedom failed to live up to the hype. All I can say now, is that it's full of stupid awful cliches, and even if that's the point (if given "freedom" people will still fall into predictable habits) it's no good in the overlong trip getting there. The fetishisation of the Oriental Other, the younger woman, the brainy-yet-earthy antidote to the ol' slag wife, was a particularly egregious touch. Perhaps I was hasty saying you and Picoult would never be in the same league.

Freedom fell into that special snowflake area; we gave you all the accolades and magazine covers just for coming out. You were supposed to be the great bespectacled hope, and you fizzled. After the initial rush of "OH THE NEW FRANZEN!" how many people have good things to say about it^**? In retrospect, is anyone loaning out their copy of Freedom saying "You have to read this!" like I do with The Corrections^†? You have your money, like Jennifer Weiner, so you don't need to care, or so the articles say. But you lost me, man, and I'm pissed off I ever stuck up for you.

Further Reading.
Further Reading pt II.
^*Text of the relevant bits:

First things first: Murder is wrong, OK? But let's say, hypothetically, that you're considering committing one anyway: how would you do it? Practically everyone wants to murder someone. That jerk that got the job you want. That guy who gets all his books reviewed while your books don’t even get published. That handsome, horrible dude everyone loves when only you know he is a complete fraud who must be exposed. Jonathan Franzen. Maybe you want to murder novelist Jonathan Franzen. Let’s say you do. You want to stand over Jonathan Franzen's wrecked body as it bubbles over with his own blood. You’re laughing and he’s just kind of lying there, gurgling. You beat him to death with an iPad and now there won’t be any more sprawling family angst novels from Mr. Handsome Fake Genius Man. Maybe that is who you want to murder. Maybe you would really enjoy wringing his skinny Brooklyn neck. His skinny, pretentious, overrated, Brooks Brothers neck. Hypothetically. Here are some things to think about while you're totally planning the fake murder you have no intention of actually doing and by reading this sentence you hereby absolve the writer of any complicity in the crimes you will in no way go out and commit here comes the period and Jim is absolved.

^**That's a real question. Do you have good things to say about Freedom? Tell me in the comments.
^†Doing some link jumping, it looks like popular opinion is starting to sour on The Corrections too. It would be worth a reread because it definitely is fashionable to hate on Franzen just now, and that probably colours things.

And maybe some of this...

Personalities

2012-01-18T11:28:00.009-05:00

When I was a kid, I remember watching a lot of TV movies with my Mom that dealt with mental illness. I'm not sure if she was drawn to them in a masochistic way — they scared her, and she let me know — or if that was just the flavour of things at the time. It's probable I saw Sybil; I definitely remember seeing When Rabbit Howls*. What I remember most about these movies, was that the "patients," those in therapy or strapped to tables getting electro-shock therapy, were always women.

Debbie Nathan, in Sybil Exposed hypothesises that particular mental illness narratives, specifically Multiple Personality Disorder, can tell us about the cultural pressures facing women at the time.

The Sybil craze erupted during a fractured moment in history, when women pushed to go forward, even as the culture pulled back in fear. Sybil, with her brilliant and traumatized multiplicity, became a language of our conflict, our idiom of distress.

Of course, women and madness have always been conflated. Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady, should you be interested, is an excellent resource on the topic of not only women and madness, but how women personify madness. A year before Sybil came out, Phyllis Chesler published a study called Women and Madness. Chesler, as quoted by Showalter,

maintains that the women confined to American mental institutions are failed but heroic rebels against the constraints of a narrow femininity, pilgrims "on a doomed search for potency," whose insanity is a label applying to gender norms and violations, a penalty for "being 'female'" as well as for desiring or daring not to be."

Nathan places not only Sybil but her doctor and her biographer^**, as women caught in this junction of what femininity was supposed to be, and how each actually expressed themselves as women.

In a middle passage of Sybil Exposed, Nathan talks about Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and how the invention of the "non-fiction novel" had an impact on the author of Sybil, Flora Schreiber. Nathan, too, takes a narrative approach to unveiling the real Sybil, Shirley Mason, and how Mason became (pseudonymously) famous for her dysfunction. Nathan follows Schreiber, Mason, and Mason's doctor, Connie Wilbur, from their childhoods through their respective deaths. It's a well-researched tour through the lives of three very different women, each interesting (or at least written in an interesting manner) in her own right. Sybil Exposed does suffer from time to time for being a bit too focused on readability. There are some awkward moments when Nathan tries to write like a novelist, and instead turns a very strange phrase. For example (and I'm sorry this made me laugh out loud): "For Flora and her contemporaries in the 1940s, Madison Avenue was the Wall Street of advertising." As well, there are scenes in which Nathan supposes to know what Flora Schreiber is thinking. Normally, this sort of conjecture wouldn't be much of a problem, but coming off a scene in which Schreiber is shown to falsify scenes in the name of sensation or narrative cohesion, this suddenly rings false.

Of course, the main "fiction" of Sybil Exposed is Shirley Mason's MPD diagnosis. It is truly shocking how Connie Wilbur extracted narratives of systemic abuse from Mason, most of which proved to be false. Under Wilbur's care, Shirley Mason became extremely addicted to several strong medications, derailing her promising scholastic career. Wilbur broke almost all the rules and ethics governing psychiatric care when dealing with Mason, growing too close to her, overdosing her, paying her bills, suggesting narratives, over-riding confessions of fakery, for her own fame. Despite the incredibly serious and permanent harm done to Mason, Wilbur isn't purely evil; since the reader has seen these characters grow up, they know nothing is so easily categorized. It is more that Wilbur's ambition gets the better of her. Nathan makes clear that Wilbur — and Mason and Schreiber — were operating at a time when ambitious women were mostly thwarted, where childless women were unnatural, and bad mothering was becoming the cause of most mental disorders.

Because Shirley Mason is dead, and many of Connie Wilbur's records were destroyed upon her death, there will always be missing pieces of the puzzle. Nathan supposes that pernicious anemia (a condition Mason really did have) was the main cause of most of Shirley Mason's original complaints, the symptoms of which were not fully understood when Mason was a young person. She was diagnosed as a hysteric instead.

Soon, Shirley would not know the difference between the bad feelings in her mind and the malfunctions in her body. All would combine, into a performance that eventually would become one of the most dramatic productions in the world[.]

Mason's life is a real study in tragedy, and not only in the fictionalised account initiated by her psychiatrist and propagated by her (first) biographer. Nathan smartly focuses on the personalities behind Sybil instead of the personalities that were ostensibly the symptoms of her illness.

Wilbur didn't just influence her patient; her work was to inform multitudes of other psychiatrists, and the hunt for ritual abuse reached epidemic and — in hindsight — very strange proportions. The media, owing to the sensation, happily jumped on board. As a child I just accepted that there were Satanists meeting in wooded areas, killing babies for their nefarious rituals. Remember, this wasn't a religious Dungeons & Dragons panic, these were medical practitioners who saw this as the cause of MPD, and they coaxed their patients into false memories of terrifyingly abusive parents, evil daycares, and cannibalistic branches of the KKK. After reading Sybil Exposed and The Psychopath Test I wonder what stage the psychiatric community is in now, and if we'll ever reach a point when we can stop getting it pretty amazingly wrong. We have to trust what's happening in the field now is correct, because there are a lot of people who need help, but it's scary to think about what will be Exposed in another 20 years.

I first came across mention of Sybil Exposed from Jessa Crispin's article on The Smart Set.

^*And would thereafter, and forever more, assume John Updike novels are about MPD.
^**On such a continuum, Plath's schizophrenic Ester Greenwood is not just a thinly-veiled portrait of the author, but representative of many women of the day.

She enters a depressive spiral in which non of the alternatives available to educated women seems satisfactory. Career women, like her editor-in-chief or the professors at her college, seem sexless and even freakish. Housewives [...] seem defeated and servile. (Showalter, 216)

Neither Flora (who like Ester was writing in New York in the 50s [and beyond]) nor Shirley ever married and none of the three ever had children.

Missed in '11: Jamrach's Menagerie

2012-01-07T11:42:00.012-05:00

The original point of Missed in '11 was to write a lot of small posts about books I read in 2011 and wanted to write about, but for some reason or another never did. The last post in this series was 1800 words. A lot of those words were quotations, but still! I underestimated... something. So, as I begin this post I'm going to hope it's a small one^*!

I bought Jamrach's Menagerie in Paris at Shakespeare and Company. This store was very high on my Need to Do list, and it's conveniently located right across the Seine from Notre Dame. Checkcheck! I'm a bookstore supporter, and I didn't just want to go and be a tourist there; I wanted to give them some money. However, as an actual tourist, I didn't want to wander around with a bunch of heavy books all day. They had a mass market of Jamrach's Menagerie which is a perfect size for touristing. It sounded super interesting from the jacket copy and it was on the Booker short-list so I was going to read it anyway. Sold!

Hoo boy. I hadn't read anything about Jamrach's Menagerie other than it was on the shortlist, and that jacket copy. What attracted me to the novel that day was the time period and by the sounds of it there would be just the faintest hint of magical realism. Good reading for Paris! It begins this way: Jaffy Brown is kind of a Dickensian child, living not in horrific squalor, but on (to the modern, removed reader) picturesque hard-scrabble London streets. He's self-sufficient to a degree, he works odd jobs, brings home that small extra money to his single-mum. The action begins when he runs into an escaped tiger, and engages physically with that tiger in a way that shocks bystanders, one of whom is the tiger's owner, the titular Jamrach. Jaffy's life changes completely at that moment and afterwards he is employed by Jamrach. Working in the menagerie, Jaffy meets Tim, and his sister, Ishbel. The London part of this book is great, totally engaging and transportive. I could easily have read 300 pages of Jaffy's adventures in London. However, when Jaffy gets a little older he outgrows the menagerie and his London confines. Jaffy wants something, and in pursuit of the unknown something he gets on a boat.

"So much for Jaffy the child. He didn't last long, did he?"

62 pages, so much for part one.

Jaffy, Tim, and Jamrach's main exotic animal acquirer Dan Rymer, are on the hunt for a Komomdo dragon. The animal at this point in time is only legendary. Capturing and bringing one back to London — alive — will make everyone's fortune. The rest of the novel changes drastically in mood and feel. Everything becomes... I'm not going to mince words here, it gets pretty horrible. No detail of life on board a sailing vessel is missed. They find and capture a Komodo dragon, but not without horrible scenes of how these animals behave. The fate of the ship and its crew gets worse, so so much worse, and I don't want to spoil it but it's a ship, so you can probably guess. I finished the novel, but it was seriously difficult going. Sitting here with the book in my hand, I can't believe it's only 300 pages because at the time it felt like so much more. It's not that I'm squeamish or that everything I read has to be sunny and happy (and if you know me, you'll know that's not really my style anyway). Just, holy shit, this book is seriously grim.

I'm sure that first part of the book is so different from the second to make the contrast more startling, and that works. This is an incredibly well-written book, with strong characters and super-real descriptions (maybe too real). I think the problem is that it's really two books, and they don't mesh well together. If the novel began with everyone getting on the boat, with some flashback exposition, it would have worked better. Unfortunately, the reader is given one book to begin with and then has to completely change gears to understand the second. If my proposal had happened I may not have finished the book because I'd have known right away it was so very much not for me. Sneaky, perhaps, of Birch to get someone like me invested enough in pages one through 61 to hang on for the rest of the ride. Like the sailors, the reader is basically stuck going through it all. In that case, I'm a bit resentful too. I'd have been happier not reading most of this book, to be honest. It's not bad, nor offensive, but the action... ugh. Yes, that's my literary criticism: "ugh."

I'm sending Jamrach's Menagerie to my Dad, because he loves books about big ships, and those that work them. Given that, I'm sure he's read some pretty bleak things, so I'll be interested to hear his take on this book. As for me, I'm actually kind of amazed I finished it.

^*Oh, hey, 800ish. I have seriously lost the brevity thread.

Missed in '11: Sense of an Ending

2012-01-05T21:36:00.015-05:00

There are pretty major spoilers in here, if you care about that sort of thing. You have been warned!

I'm sitting in my kitchen listening to Carol Off talk to Julian Barnes about The Sense of an Ending on the CBC. I didn't initially fall in love with this book, so sometimes it's good to hear the author talk about things and shed some light on the motivations, because my first reading, as you'll see below, could pretty much be summed up with: “bwah!?” Everyone loved this book on first read, and all I could think about was these streams of wicked, strange, or stupid women that populate the novel. One of the things Barnes said in this interview, is that Tony — the narrator of The Sense of an Ending — isn't a bad guy, he doesn't hate women, he's just confused by them. This really, really shows. Stephen Hawking was interviewed recently, and when asked “What do you think most about during the day?” he replied “Women. They are a complete mystery.”^* This tidbit is what made all the headlines, but why was anyone surprised? Freud famously didn't know what women wanted (and he told them what to want instead, didn't he?). Not understanding women is the cheeky default of a certain kind of man who would rather make the joke than try. Tony, according to Barnes-on-the-radio, has mostly lived a life unexamined, and that leads to a terrible characterization of the other half of the population. I suppose I just have to take Barnes on his word that Tony is clueless, not “bad.” Tony is not to be admired, not even in the end. Tony is not redeemed. Tony remains clueless and he's probably too old to care, or to change.^**

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? and also — if this isn't too grand a word — our tragedy.

I can't help but notice when men put things onto women that aren't really a thing. (See also "magical sperm phallacy") After Tony has a sexual encounter with ex-girlfriend Veronica, the following conversation takes place:

'You selfish bastard,' she said, the next time we met.
'Yes, well, there it is.'
'That practically makes it rape'

This is after she removed her own “knickers,” handed him a condom from her own stash, and put the thing on him. As one would expect, the word "rape" sticks to Tony. Later, when she gets together with his old school chum, Adrian, Tony is

[i]magining what Veronica might have said to Adrian about me ('He took my virginity and then immediately dumped me. So really, the whole thing felt like rape, do you see?')

This is a pretty weird piece of the narrative, thinking that women are so quick to call "rape" when most of the time we can't call it rape when it really does happen to us. So what's happening here? Is Barnes as clueless about women as Tony? It's this some sort of false memory? Note the second quoted passage: Tony imagines Veronica calling it rape. Is this some sort of fear-based wish-fulfillment? Tony's afraid she's saying these things to other people, so he decides that yes, she actually has said this, and to him. One can't be sure whether it's Tony or Barnes, but it's worth pondering. Tony also subscribes to that the old virgin/whore dichotomy. I have no qualm with this in context of characterization. It works, because Tony is the Everybloke, to every degree.

And did you think her a virgin when she was rolling a condom on to your cock? In a strange way, you know, I did. I thought it might be one of those intuitive female skills I inevitably lacked. Well, perhaps it was.

I know it's possible for men to write really believable women; many succeed. So when shit like this happens, especially in a book that's big award-winner, I wonder what's up. (And of course, I don't notice when women do the same to men, because I am not a man, and I'd happily accept examples where men found women's writing to be very weird and wrong. On the flip-side, there has been universal acclaim for Lynn Coady getting it right in The Antagonist.) As soon as I start wondering, I start looking at the rest of the female characters. Tony's mother is presented as stupid (though all young people feel this way about their parents at some point). Interestingly, Barnes said in the interview I heard today that his father was “wiser” than his mother, so there's something of Barnes in Tony here. His daughter, Susie, is slightly self-absorbed, and distant.

She's practical about emotions, Susie is. Gets that from her mother. So my emotions as they actually are don't concern her.

She spends more time with his ex-wife, who cuckolded him. This is okay though, because she gets what she deserves:

Margaret's second husband turned out to be not quite peaceable enough: he took off with someone who looked rather like her, but was that crucial ten years younger

She and Tony have a "good" relationship, but one gets the sense he feels slightly controlled by her. It's amusing how Margaret and Tony talk of the mysterious woman, how one is or is not that woman, but all women are basically a mystery to him.

Margaret used to say that there were two sorts of women: those with clear edges to them, and those who implied mystery.

This reductionist categorization seems more in line with how Tony looks at women. Again, I wonder if Tony is putting words in someone's mouth (though women do make judgements about other women all the time, but I'm thinking of how this particular book works). Veronica is dubbed "the fruitcake" later by Margaret, and Tony agrees. Meeting up after 40-odd years, Tony finds the same old, cold Veronica, who gives him the female stereotypical “If you don't know why I'm angry I'm not going to tell you” line so many times. Maybe it's repeated so often, because Barnes knows it's a cliché.

'You just don't get it, do you? But then you never did.'

'You still don't get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.'

'If you need to ask the question, then the answer is no.'

The only woman in The Sense of an Ending who seems at all nice or caring winds up — spoiler alert — seducing Adrian and baring his child. The child likely has Down's Syndrome:"'The Mother' — at a dangerously late age. A child damaged as a result." A result of the mother's age, a result of her scheming to take the boyfriend away from her daughter. (Is this why she was so nice to Tony when he visited the family home?) The sins of the mother visited on the child, and Veronica is tasked of caring for him after her mother dies.

With Veronica I moved from blaming her for having failed to save Adrian to pitying her.

Adrian kills himself, young, while — as far as Tony knows — still with Veronica.

The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica

Unlike the ladies of The Sense of an Ending, Adrian is the shining light of the narrative. He is the stand-out, is interesting in ways good and bad, which are all things that Tony will never be. If Adrian is the only thing that gave an ordinary life a narrative, Veronica is the villain of that narrative for taking the novel-worthy away from him.

I did, eventually, find myself thinking straight. That's to say, understanding Adrian's reasons, respecting them, and admiring him.

And that's early on in the novel, before the reflections of age. Later:

I don't envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life.

Adrian remains a shining star for Tony, possibly because he didn't live long enough to be tarnished. He's Tony's dead rock star.

The Sense of an Ending is chock-a-block with ruminate wisdom. Part of me wanted to quote everything, but I had to stop myself from transcribing half the book. When Tony talks about ageing, about the things he's learned, about what it's like to be average and how infernally dull it is to be completely normal, I rather liked the book. These parts certainly speak to a person like me, who feels pretty average in all ways. I wish that would have been more of the content, instead of the paean to male friendship, and how women are just so weird (though isn't Adrian weird, isn't his suicide, and his affair with Veronica's mother very, very weird?). I suppose, though, that would cut an already slim book down to an essay. Like last year's winner The Finkler Question, we have a mild-mannered, white middle-class middle-aged man telling his story in a calm and characteristically English funny way. I laughed out loud at both books, I really liked Finkler and felt that was the right choice that year for the Booker. But following that with The Sense of an Ending seemed a bit... not predictable, but sigh-worthy. Really? Another one of these? Some people feel frustrated about historical fiction taking prizes (I've heard the term "Giller Bait" bandied about, referring to historical fiction in Canada), and this is how I feel about the middle-aged, middle-class white English guy wondering just what it all means. It's a bit, just a little bit, tired. Not enough, yet, to annoy me, but we'll see what happens next year.

You get towards the end of life — no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. [...] I thought of what I couldn't know or understand now, of all that couldn't ever be known or understood. [...] There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is a great unrest.

^*My twitter-snark response: “This from a guy who left his wife for his nurse.” ETA: Ouch. Then there's this: For years there have been shocking rumours of violence and abuse against the vulnerable scientist.
^**”I will not change and I will not be nice.”

Missed in '11: The Marriage Plot

2012-01-03T14:42:00.001-05:00

The "Missed in '11" exercise is also partially about clearing out the queue of posts I have sitting here, without the guilt of deleting them. Problem is, of course, that the thoughts in these drafts aren't fully formed, and in some cases I don't even have the book anymore (thank you for existing, Toronto Public Library). This post on The Marriage Plot suffers all these conditions, so I'll try to make as much sense of it as possible while trying not to re-hash old ground; this was a much-anticipated book, and has already had a lot written about it!

I loved that The Marriage Plot is partially a book about books. I loved most the passages when the characters are actively engaging with text. Madeline reads Barthes and it directly affects her, differently as her year goes on. She carries it with her like advice guide and Bible in one. That’s the sort of thing that makes theory important. It’s not just dry linguistic wank, or at least it doesn’t have to be. It is beautiful, what Eugenides does with A Lover's Discourse. Mitchell, second-side of the love triangle, takes a wide variety of texts with him when he travels through Europe and India. He, too, is shown to live with and through the books he’s reading. Leonard (the love interest) — despite having met Madeline in the semiotics class that brought Barthes into her life — doesn’t really seem to read. He is Other, he’s a scientist, he’s cold numbers. It’s a set up, and you can’t really root for Madeline and Leonard, even if you’re not a book person (and if you’re not why the heck you’d be reading Eugenides is a mystery).

Now, for the complain-y part…

I can't figure out why two boys would be so in love with this horribly bland girl. I mean, I get that the book isn't really about the girl, it's about the boys, and that might be why she's written so blandly. Mitchell and Leonard are given complexities, rather vicious ups and downs, broad geographical range. Madeline only seems to have one mood: a sort of wandering wide-eyed confusion (oh, but she's "book smart"). She's recognized as the American version of beautiful but that seems to be the only thing to recommend her. She's the sort of girl who just has it so easy, things just come to her. She's privileged, athletic, a scholar who isn't challenged. She's a bit of a narcissist, frankly, with the Madeline wallpaper that she loves as a child remaining in her bedroom . Her interior life, and she does have one, is stunted in this way, stuck a bit in me-me land, the way a child is. She’s not malicious or cruel, she’s just so used to things being at worst mildly unpleasant. She is so coddled and padded. And perhaps that's a lot of it, that she is just a child, and children are not fascinating dinner companions; they're funny and cute but they're not complex and interesting.

I don't know the Regency source material of the marriage plot, I haven't read any Austen, so I’m not sure how this flows with Eugenides plot and characterization. I’m probably not far off to assume that the women in life and literature of the time, were probably talked around and about, instead of to, were treated like large children until the second they got married, and then had to assume the role of an adult immediately. And that may explain why Madeline’s mother brings her older sister Alywn to her, so the two sisters can discuss Alwyn's failing marriage. Madeline, as a newlywed at the point, is supposed to have sage advice to give to an older sibling, who has just had a baby. The only time Madeline interested me was when she to a Victorian Literature conference, where Gilbert or Gubar (I forget which) was speaking (nice touch)^*. There, she finds others who share her love of literature, and decides to become a Victorianist, which is a newly emerging field when the book is set.

I don't think she takes care of Leonard when his mental illness becomes too large for him to deal with himself because she loves him; Leonard made her feel validated and adored when he was healthy, and she’s trying to recapture that. She never really had to grow up, but Leonard who comes from a very troubled family had to take responsibility very early. (Mitchell seems like a bit of a child too, when he literally runs away from having to clean up human feces while volunteering in a Hospital in India. Again, they're well suited.) Madeline’s parents have weird family meetings to discuss her life while she sits there; they talk around her, they keep her in that child state. So why do these two boys love this bland, perfect thing so much? Are we supposed to believe that these two, perhaps by extension many others, aren’t so interested in a woman’s interior as they are with her image? It’s a mystery that honestly plagued me through the book, because I’d expected more from Eugenides.

And then on the very last page... he resolves it. Humanely, lovely.

The Marriage Plot doesn't reach the great heights that Middlesex did, and while I spent a fair amount of time being frustrated with the characterization (and I kind of feel like the really great ending is kind of snatching things out of the fire at the last possible moment) I do still recommend people read it, if they've liked his work before. It's not a big disappointment the way Freedom was, after The Corrections. Not every book is an author's best book, and The Marriage Plot is still a very good book.

^*And at that moment in the book, I had the weirdest sensation of being jealous of a fictional character.

Missed in '11: The Montreal Poets

2012-01-02T12:31:00.016-05:00

I don't read a lot of poetry. This isn't Poetry's fault, I just don't have the tools, perhaps, to give it what it deserves. Both these poets, however, moved me enough to want to share my experience of their work. Dave McGimpsey's Li'l Bastard and Jon Paul Fiorentino's Indexical Elegies are as different as can be, but both are wonderful collections.

Li'l Bastard has a travelling narrative running behind it, that makes the “chubby sonnets” read like a memoir. McGimpsey's sly love of "low" culture — fast food, pop music, and Hollywood — is always conscious, but he doesn't let the world get away with serving up lesser quality even in these experiences. (He would also probably appreciate that I began writing this review with a bit of a hangover and a craving for tacos.) I'd read a couple of the poems in a friend's copy of the book, and they seemed a bit sad, yet wry and pop-culture conscious. Basically the exact qualities I love in Douglas Coupland. When McGimpsey read at the Coach House fall launch, the poems were more alive, felt slightly bawdy, and a lot funnier. McGimpsey's reading persona seems like a better dressed Falstaff, and you could easily imagine him leading a group of youngsters to a cheerful and perfectly legal life of semi-depravity. I kept that in-person voice in my head when I got down to reading Li'l Bastard on the plane ride to and from France. Lovely to read the Versailles poems having been there only days before. I suppose the comparison can be made to Los Angeles — the section of the book I enjoyed the most — but as opulent as the Americans can get, they'll never get close to things that made me exclaim what the Frenchy gilded fuck!?

116. Place Versailles.
Bronze frolickers in copper fountains.
More copper fountains, more bronze frolicking.
Aztec in influence, or perhaps Bauhaus.
It's not really as garish as it sounds.

To assess the artistic merit
of Versailles is to consider the triumph
of two sexy lingerie shops competing
in a mall. Oui! Versailles Pik-Nik Donut.

There's a sound barrier by the highway now
as if the ghosts who live au bout de l'île
need to eat their apples free from the noise
while they consider their office gossip.

The best thing to do to an enemy
is poison their supply of canned bean dip.
'I'm in Anjou!'I tell all my friends
As if light years from dips of any kind. (135).

Edit on that bad boy. He's talking about a mall in Montreal, not a royal residence in France. Which, you know, makes the thing about the lingerie shops make more sense. But there's a highway behind Versailles, too. There's anachronistic statuary, confusions of influence. And hey, there's poetry being whatever you, me, silly person, brings to the table. Though I was all "Why is he in France all of a sudden?" And it makes these lines from earlier in the book become a kind of motif. (Augh, so good!)
I'm not a stylist but I did discover one phrase
that could make anything seem insignificant —
and that phrase was 'Made in Canada.' ("46. Tonight's Episode: Springtime for Schemers" 55)
McGimpsey seems to prefer LA (and so do I). There are a lot of other places to travel to in Li'l Bastard and so many moments that are half-chuckle, half-sigh. Jersey Shore and Schubert in the same line. I dog-eared every tenth page. I loved every second.

86. Oceanside.
Every new-to-Cali knob thinks the sunlands
Will dry out the damp root of their eastern ache;
it’s as ridiculous as movie scenes where men
jump off rooftops and don’t end up in wheelchairs.

There’s a simple logic to L.A.’s values.
People don’t pretend your personality
is of consequence. The wisdom of
prostitution blossoms with magnolias^*.

Angelinos live like they believe people
only care about you for your money
or your tits. Life is more relaxed, relieved
of a grad student’s sense of what is fair.

Brandy and plastic cups in the parking lot —
a little impromptu eucharist.
This is your body and this is your body —
a good chug for pretending you don’t care. (101)

Indexical Elegies is the first book of poetry that has had me scribbling madly in the margins since my grades depended doing so. It's also a more... I hesitate to say traditional, because Fiorentino has his own voice (obviously, since his writing stood out so much for me) but more what you would expect from poetry. It's more esoteric, softer in tone, more obviously introspective (you have to dig a bit for that in McGimpsey, but it's there). Given all that, it's harder for me to talk about, but here goes!

Suppose you’ve been found out and you find out you
don’t care. Suppose you process this supposition.
(“Cruelty-as-Trend.” 17)

I know Fiorentino from Twitter a little bit, so I know we share a love of the Mozzer. There are stanzas in “I'm pulling for your narrative”

The word lovely wakes
you up at 4 p.m. and says:

It's been a while
it's lost its charm

You sleep too much
you drink too long (20)

that remind me so much of “Will Never Marry” where Morrissey says

An inbuilt guilt catches up with you
And as it comes around to your place
At 5 A.M.; wakes you up and it laughs in your face.

There are some interesting thoughts about anti-pretension pretension; the tired idea that the creative exists only from a place of relative squalor. “It's easy to look down on you/from this basement suite” (“Grift economy” 18) “Don't let yourself let/everyone know you get paid.” (“Cautiously solipsistic” 24) The smooth and delicate wordplay, and macro-thinking about art, ("Don't have a problem/in writing/Need a/room in which to brood” [“Mentholism” 11]) moves into deeply personal pieces about loss. I made no notes, just felt every sad moment. In the face of such loss, what art means, means nothing. The writer can do nothing but write:

Tied up in theory
so cold on consignment

Dust gathers
librarians dust

He's dead

Too much displacement
not enough condensation (untitled? 50)

To escape the pain, possibly, of loss, Fiorentino moves backwards in time in the third part — Transpraire — to the days before Montreal, back to Winnipeg. His already sparse and concise lines become even more punctuated, move into sharp bullet-point lists. These are thin poems that run you through like killer blades of prairie grass. By way of contrast, lest the reader become to used to the flow, there is one engorged piece of nostalgia, “Famous grey Chevette” (a nod to Famous Blue Raincoat possibly?), shaped like a dense fog or cloud in the middle of the section. Transprarie moves from death back into life, all the ghosts of past/present/future accounted for, ending appropriately with “Dying in Winnipeg.”

I know punctuation and the like are super important to poetry. Therefore, if I've messed anything up in the transcription, I apologize!
^*Magnolias showed up in another book I was reading around the same time, and for some reason this just stood out for me. “The magnolia trees hadn’t read Roland Barthes. They didn’t think love was a mental state; the magnolias insisted it was natural, perennial.” Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (65).

New Year's Day 2012

2012-01-01T12:07:00.008-05:00

Last year on this date I was in a glorious house in the Hollywood Hills, convalescing from the effects of free-pour gin at a Bootie party. Awesome. Today I'm writing this in rainy Toronto, listening to the CBC with a napping boyfriend beside me. Both have their merits. Okay, full disclosure: I'm a bit hungover today as well. That may explain some run-on thoughts in this post.

I like to do my year-end wrap up stuff on the 1^st, because who knows what kind of crazy stuff can happen between Xmas and New Years. Nothing crazy happened. I did finish a couple books over the break though, so those made it onto the Read List.

I wrote things this year that got a little bit of attention, which was pretty great. I was, in a way, long-listed on the Canada Writes True Winter Tales contest^* (they called it "featured"). I actually didn't think I had a chance of winning, because I assumed they were looking for a more Vinyl Cafe feel-good kind of story (and indeed they were). It was a lovely surprise to be featured, but of course a let-down not to make the short list. I also wrote a quick blog post for Shameless Magazine that got quite a wide and appreciative response (surprising me quite a bit). This is encouraging stuff. The feedback makes me want to keep trying. I still can't write fiction, but I think maybe I shouldn't even try. Last night a friend said (jokingly, and with wine involved) "fiction is dead." I sure hope not, because I need it! However, her having said that lets me off the hook from this weird idea that I need to write fiction to be a "writer." Negotiating all this self-definition is terrifying for me, probably because the line between that and self-aggrandizement (or full-on delusion) is pretty thin, and stepping over makes you look like an asshole. Let's move on!

I read 64 books this year, which is more than any other year since I've been keeping track. I also counted poetry and plays in there, so maybe that's a bit of a cheat. Today I began to write a post like last year's about books I really enjoyed this year, but instead I think I'll just throw out some mini-reviews through this week on books that didn't get blogged in 2011, but should have. In the meantime, click here for all the books I read this year.

Happy New Year, pals. Thanks, always, for taking the time to read here. It's nice to know I'm not shouting into a void.

^*Adapted from the original post here.

Fables of Elbow Drive

2011-12-08T14:36:00.012-05:00

When I was 23, I had a weekly, weeknight DJ gig in an alternative bar in Calgary. Well, the alternative bar in Calgary, not by dint of being the best but the only. I was a regular there, had been for years, so I knew most of the patrons. Weeknights in a dance club were for students (as I was), people without office jobs ("industry workers" as they were called), the underemployed, the artists and musicians, and the gainfully employed who really like to drink. The weekday crowd was less boisterous, more friendly, more willing to be silly, more likely to request a lesser-heard track. There was no pressure to pack the dance floor — it wasn't possible with a quarter-full bar — so I'd happily oblige with a flurry of odd songs. It was on one of these nights a fellow DJ friend wandered up to the booth. "I've taken six hits of acid," he said. He was probably exaggerating, but he was definitely tripping balls. "My friends have all left. Can we hang out?" (Acid, by the way, is one of those drugs you don't have to be on to find hilarious. People on acid are hilarious on their own.)

When the club closed for the night, my friend wanted to go through Mount Royal to where Elbow Drive follows the curve of the Elbow River. He told me he'd grown up around there. So we drove south and east from the club, to the outskirts of downtown. I'd never spent much time in this part of the city. It was relatively old, and far away from my parents' house in the north. Unlike the rocky banks of the fast-moving Bow, the Elbow River was bordered by flat and manicured grass, parks, and stately homes.^* I could just barely hear the water moving along in the moonlight. He told me stories of being a kid around the area, where he used to play, the place where he kissed his first girlfriend. 3 a.m. on a summer Wednesday night is a pretty great time to discover a place in a city you've lived in all your life.

It was a picture of that night that entered — and stayed in — my mind reading "Home for Good" in Katherine Govier's Fables of Brunswick Avenue. I picked up the collection after it was mentioned a couple times by friends, one of whom quoted the axiom "Everyone lives on Brunswick Avenue sooner or later." I was apartment hunting at the time, and my library request for the collection came in the same day as a viewing of an apartment on Brunswick. A good omen, I thought. I didn't get the apartment, and I didn't exactly get what I was expecting from Fables either. The title of the collection is a bit misleading; very few of the stories take place in Toronto at all. However, a couple take place in Alberta, one of those in Calgary.

"Home for Good" begins with my nightmare scenario: a woman, Suzanne, returns to Calgary after many years of living in Toronto. While the job she has secured in Calgary is a step up and the ostensible reason for her move, the truth is that her life in Toronto was in utter shambles.

She walked over to the dormer window which made an alcove in her living room. She was a tenant in the attic of the kind of old house she had grown up in. The house had been painted and papered and divided into “heritage” apartments, although only fifteen years had passed since she left. Surely things happened too quickly in this town. Everything was a mistake, including the apartment. It had reminded her of a Toronto apartment, that was why she had taken it. But in Calgary it didn’t seem so choice; it made her feel as if she couldn’t afford anything better.

(I live in one of those third-floor Toronto apartments currently, by the way.) Suzanne visits friends who live by the Elbow, "From the window [of her apartment] she could see over to the riverside park." Suzanne remembers sneaking out to that park at 2 a.m. as a kid. I probably sat in that same park at 3 a.m. Govier captures exactly how it would feel to have to go back, to have to stare that feeling of failure in the face, to have to relive every moment everyone back home failed you, and the ways they've changed in your absence to fail you now.

It's true, things happen really quickly in Calgary. It's a city that really likes to knock things down and build new things as fast as it can. Yet when Govier's character remembers her 1968 student apartment near the university (probably still called an outpost of the U of A back then), I can picture the whole neighbourhood perfectly. The LRT I took to that same university cut through Motel Village. That Denny's saw late-night milkshakes in high-school. The bar I got into underage was right there. It's the same city. Some things never change.

I was kind of spooked by "Home for Good." I've still got my Norton anthologies as Suzanne does; they go where I go. I know I'm not the only one who takes all her school books with her through every move, but I could so perfectly see everything in "Home for Good," understood Suzanne's want for "a book somewhere that said how you were supposed to feel when you were no longer young, but you were not yet dead." There was a moment a year into living in Toronto when I almost went back, when everything seemed too hard and too expensive. I always fear I'll be forced to go back, that some misfortune will drive me there... When I picked up Fables of Brunswick Avenue I expected a fictional primer on my new stomping-ground. I didn't move to Brunswick Avenue; I was moved — thankfully, in time only — back home.

^*Image found through Google; click on it for the site it came from. I suppose it being broad daylight in that photo takes away from the image I'm going for there, but so be it.

Gimmie

2011-12-05T14:42:00.010-05:00

I've been trying to avoid the navel-gazey "what is the nature of blogging" posts, and for the most part I've been successful. Probably because I just don't bother to feel pressure to write anymore. Weirdly this has resulted in more blog posts this year than any other. To get even more "nature of blog," about five minutes ago a fellow blogger published her own thoughts on the topic I discuss in this post, and even though I've been sitting on it since late yesterday afternoon, just needing 15 minutes downtime to edit and clean it up, I feel like I shouldn't even bother now. Meh! Anyway...

I want to talk a bit about an article that I read via Twitter yesterday: Has book blogging hit the wall?. There was a little debate after the link was posted. Bloggers were cast as a whole, an amorphous blob of want and entitlement, satiated only by free goods. I got a little miffed, like I do. I responded that I've reviewed three free books here, one of which was offered to me on the blog itself. The other two are from the one publisher list I'm on. I'm careful to only ask for books I know I'll read even though many more are offered. This is only fair: copies are limited and the books should go to someone who wants them. I don't really understand that idea that if something is "free" it must be taken, especially since the books they send are ARCs, so it's not like they look pretty on your shelf or anything. Raj Patel says interesting things about "free" stuff in The Value of Nothing. Paraphrasing Marcel Mauss' The Gift he says

in sociology as in economics, there's rarely anything that comes free from expectations of reciprocity and respect.

Patel is talking about companies much larger than Harper or Penguin, like Nestle or AT&T, but the concept is the same: companies are not your friends, they (probably) don't know you or care about you as a person, they are entering into an agreement with you. There isn't ever something for nothing. Yes, there is a sense of entitlement among some, and my Twitter pal did state that entitlement is definitely not limited to book bloggers. But it's also not a defining characteristic of all book bloggers. I can't be the only one out there who doesn't feel that my internet connection means I'm owed something. The article, however, makes it sound as if my pal's initial assessment was correct. Wow, these are unsavoury people!

I know a bit about how all this works. I've sent out free books myself, when I had the opportunity to do such things. It's a relationship, and it should be one of respect. To diverge a bit, in the days of Panic Yore, I was a club and college radio DJ. Those are pretty much the only venues non-top 40 music gets played, or were before the Rise of the Machines — er, internet — so genre labels would "service" DJs with new releases. However, the DJs had to keep playlists and send those back to the record label. As with book blogging and free books, you need to prove to the publisher or label that their investment in you is worth it. Further, it seems to me that if book bloggers want to be taken seriously they need to act professionally. If they want to treat their blog as a hobby, with no deadlines or professional courtesy, which is probably closer to what I do, then bloggers need to be prepared to pay for that hobby. If you wanted to be treated like a professional (from the article, "Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or The NYTimes?") then you must be prepared to meet deadlines and act responsibly. (Note, I say "be prepared" to do so: there doesn't need to be a deadline involved, but if one is provided, it should be respected.) The relationship William Morrow wants to have with its bloggers is sensible and reasonable, and it's exactly how the one publisher I deal with runs things now. You can't just send books out into the dark and hope they stick. Targeted and focused marketing just makes sense. Larry from the article just doesn't understand the concept of "relationship" or "fairness."

It's not enough that it is 'your job' to review their books within a one month span before or after its release date," wrote Larry at The OF Blog, "but they couch in sweet talk the threat to pull review copies because you don't want to play their game."

"Play their game"!? Getting adversarial is no way to conduct a relationship, Larry. Perhaps publishers who operated like William Morrow, with a buffet style, have to shoulder some of the blame for not figuring out a better strategy from the get-go. Though maybe they were just optimistic about human nature. Fools!

It's really too bad the article has the tone it does. It does make bloggers seem whiny and entitled, where most of the ones I know are anything but. I wrote a garbled Tweet about the number of books I own but haven't read (I blame the head cold), which sounded a bit like I had no intention of reading them. What I meant was, I buy so many books, and have so many in the library queue, that I sometimes get a bit bogged down in the To-Read List. What I wanted to convey in that Tweet, was that I spend my money at readings, and launches, and indie bookstores (and the chains when all else fails) because it's important that I put my money where my mouth is.^** I want those publishers and writers to have my dollars, because they are providing me with the thing I love the most: the written word. I'm saddened that there are bloggers out there that feel it is their right to receive freebies, especially in an industry with such low margins, where the producers of of the content almost always have a second, 40-hour a week job.

Update! I've compiled responses from other bloggers here. If you know of others, let me know and I'll link them. It's interesting, to me at least, how others have reacted.
From Pickle Me This: What I Hate About Book Bloggers
From Books Under Skin: On book blogging
From Bella's Bookshelves: The Book Blogger’s Responsibility: What?
Larry, of the OF Blog, responds to the uproar (and to me): Fallout from last week's posts on reviewing/William Morrow letter

^*I've been the same with running, coincidentally. The year I don't set a goal or do any races is the year I have the best results, and most gains. I thought I worked well under pressure. Turns out, maybe not so much.
^**I use the library system pretty extensively too. I wouldn't ever have enough space in my tiny apartment for all the books I want. But I want to.

The Complications of Definition

2011-11-27T15:14:00.014-05:00

The day after Half-Blood Blues won the Giller Prize, the copy I had requested from the library finally came in. (I put it on hold when it was short-listed for the Booker.) Good timing there. I was pretty surprised Edugyan won the Giller, since I figured Ondaatje had a lock on it, just by existing. A lovely surprise though, and good on the jury for going with—what was to me—something unexpected. Among the Twittering class, it seemed The Antagonist was the favourite for the Giller. It took me while to get into The Anatagonist, but I felt it really came together well in the last 30 or so pages, and totally justified anything I'd tripped up on before. Anyway, this post isn't about the Giller or Lynn Coady (who has a really great Twitter presence, by the way).

It's can be tough to write about music.^* How do you describe it? How can you make a reader understand what the music sounds like, why it sounds that way? Edugyan is such a good writer, that she’s able to describe the technical details of playing jazz in a lyrical (see what I did thar?) way:

Kid wasn't even hardly listening, it seemed. Handling his horn with an unexpected looseness, with a almost slack hand, he coaxed a strange little groan from his brass. Like there was this trapped panic, this barely held-in chaos, and Heiro hisself was the lid.
I pulled back some as he come in, fearing we was going to overpower him in that narrow closet. But he just soften it down with me, blurr it up. Then he blast out one pure, brilliant note, and I thought, my god.

Edugyan not only describes the playing, and the piece, but the emotions embedded in it. Half-Blood Blues is the story of a piece of music, how that piece came to be, and who the people were that created it: Sid, the narrator of the novel and bass-player; Chip, his oldest friend and extremely talented percussionist; and Heiro, a prodigious horn player.

It wasn't true blues, sure, ain't got the right chord structure, but the kid ain't cared none. "Blues," he said, coughing roughly, "blue wasn't never bout the chords."

It has that same feeling of heat and sadness. I'm not going to pretend to be a jazz (or blues!) scholar or aficionado, I just know the way certain pieces, and artists, make me feel. Edugyan’s characters talk about jazz in that way, in the feeling. They risk their lives, they risk each other's lives, to capture that feeling perfectly onto a record. Edugyen captures the feeling perfectly on paper.

I might have been crying. It was the sounds of something growing a crust, some watery thing finally gelling. The very sound age, of growing older, of adolescent rage being tempered by a man's heart.

Edugyan does an amazing job of telling the story of Black jazz musicians in Europe at the outbreak of war, and it’s important that they’re not all American, so as to give lie to the notion of one monolithic “Black experience.” Half-Blood Blues is a thoughtful piece on how “race” is a very complicated concept. The “half-blood” refers to many of the characters in the novel. Almost no one is simply Black (and that’s essentially true of any population in Europe or North America)—if you take that as a concept of skin rather than a cultural one. Though, of course, it's cultural too. The complexities of a Black identity are in direct juxtaposition to the pure-blood Aryan movement happening in Germany during the novel^†. Wrapped up in how Blackness is experienced, there are differing levels of privilege, illustrated here within the microcosm of the band: Sid’s oldest and closest friend, Chip, does extremely well for himself later in life; Louis Armstrong is – by way of his fame – able to escape the worst of the war, and one of the characters bitterly remarks that everything is okay “as long as he gets out.” Edugyan educates the reader, through the character of Hieronymous Falk, about the Mischling: German children born of white mothers and African soldier fathers.

He was a Mischling, a half-breed, but so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander. Hell, his skin glistened like pure oil. But he was German-born, sure. And if his face wasn't of the Fatherland, just bout everything else bout him rooted him there right good. And add to this fact that he didn't have no identity papers right now--well, let's just say wasn't no cakewalk for him

In a documentary made fifty years later about Heiro, the band's first manager elucidates:

"Life for black people under the Third Reich," he said through his nose, "was extremely contradictory. This is because there were so many different types of black people, and their treatment depended on what group they belonged to. [...] Hieronymous Falk," he went on, "now, he belonged to a rarer group. He was what back then was called a 'Rhineland Bastard.'

France sent in African soldiers from French colonial countries after WWI to occupy the Rhineland.

So even after the soldiers were sent home, and Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland, these children were seen as part of a significant insult to Germany. A cultural stain.

Heiro has the worst of all worlds. He is German, but is permanent reminder to all that see him of their defeat in WWI (and this is of course more and more dangerous as the years go on, and Nationalism rises). He’s denied citizenship under Hitler, but when he’s in soon-to-be occupied Paris, he’s cautioned against speaking in public. Heiro is German, he’s the enemy, he represents the invaders, even though his country of origin refuses to grant him a national identity. Heiro is completely stateless and lost. It’s heartbreaking. And it gets worse.
While in Hamburg, Heiro takes Sid to a zoo to show him a specific exhibit.

Black folk. Barefoot, dressed in rags and bones. And despite all the mud, despite the filth and the flies, their skin looked weirdly shiny. All silvery black, like the zookeepers kept them buffed up like onyx.
A ache come into my chest. "They keep people here?"
"This is just the African exhibit," Heiro muttered. "They got one for Samoans, for Esquimaux." He was trying to smile, like it ain't so horrifying. Or like it so horrifying, it funny. But the smile ain't reached his eyes.
"A human zoo," I mumbled. "Shit." I was just too damn astonished to say anything else.

It’s a difficult passage, and I wrestle with it. Is it that Germany saw all non-Aryans as animals? That seems too simplistic a reading. I keep feeling as if it’s just another level that Edugyan has placed on the hierarchy. By accident of birth, Heiro is considered more human than those born in Africa. Sid and Chip have US have citizenship, though would be subject to Jim Crow laws in many parts of the country. How high you are on the ladder depends, always, on someone under you. It’s something most of the characters are forced to engage with, and in my mind, it’s what drives Sid’s antagonist feelings towards Heiro. Sid is simply a better-than-most musician, and he resents Heiro’s talent. He wants take Heiro down a rung, not realizing Heiro feels – probably is – closer in situation to the caged Africans than his American bandmates.

I really loved Half-Blood Blues. It doesn't hurt that I just went to Paris a couple months ago, so the city in which most of the action takes place was still fresh in my mind^**. I think I said something earlier in the year (not specifically about Half-Blood) about "Nazi books" and how I'm a little worn out on them. Yet, authors keep coming up with new stories to tell, and new ways of looking at WWII. Half-Blood Blues is really, really sad, and beautiful, and it only became more so as it went on. So sad, that I didn’t want to finish, because the thing with WWII novels is you know that things are not exactly going to go well. Edugyan does relieves tension at the very beginning by telling the reader what happens to Heiro in Paris within the fist 20 pages or so, and in doing so makes the heartbreak of the journey to it ever-present.

^*"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
^**And the thing with Paris, is that it basically stopped building in the late 19^th century, so other than modern cosmetic touches, it looks pretty much the same as it would have to Edugyan’s characters.
^†I'm not sitting here pontificating on Black identity, though. I hope I'm not, anyway. I have zero first-hand knowledge of not being white. I'm acutely aware of this and I'm trying to restrict my analysis to what is in the text only. If I have over-stepped I'm happy to be told so.

The Female of the Species is More Deadlier Than the Male

2011-10-04T20:07:00.010-04:00

I know I just said that I'm not hard on fiction. I guess what I mean, is that it takes a lot for me to call something a "bad book" or to say that I've wasted my time reading a novel. I finish almost everything I start, and there have been only two exceptions in the past couple years. However, most of the things I'm about to say about Snowdrops are complaints. It's nominated for the Booker, so I don't have to be rhapsodic about its merits, of which there are many. It's a caper book, that's made clear from the start. There is a sense of fun when speeding through, knowing there's a scam, wondering how it will unfold. Snowdrops has a bit of a pulp thriller feel to it, though written in a more high-minded style, more thoughtful than throwing a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter.

I enjoyed reading Snowdrops while I was reading it, but something nagged at me. About a week after I finished, I finally realised: I am sick of the honey-trap. I'm tired of the nebbishy guy seduced by the "bad" girl. I felt like I'd read Girl Crazy all over again, but set in Russia. Our protagonist, Nick, is a lawyer just moved to Moscow. He's a mediocre sort of fellow, without much in the way of personality, not much success with women, not much of a looker. Nick will be defined by the events around him, pulled along with the flow of cynical Russians, all on the take. Nick does not act, he reacts. Nick wants, but lets others take. Like Russell Smith's protagonist in Girl Crazy, Nick first encounters the conveniently slutty love interest while she's in distress. In this case, he foils a purse snatching. And Masha, after an accelerated courtship, gives him her body (and for extra kink, her “sister” watches). She continues to string Nick along for months, to ensure his help in the caper. (I'm not giving anything away here. Again, this is all foreshadowed in the telling.)

'In Russia,' Steve said, 'there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories.'

Nick falls in love anyway. He thinks of marrying Masha, even though he knows nothing about her, and admits as much to himself in the narrative —constructed as a letter to his now fiancée (like in Girl Crazy there's a dull, dependable girl at the end, to act as foil to the wild girl of yore).

That's what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn't about Russia. It never is, I don't think, when a relationship ends. It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.

Caper accomplished, Masha conveniently disappears so that Nick can get onto being whatever it is he's learned to be. He can go back to England having had the Great Adventure, settle down with his predictable boring late-life wife.

One is supposed to separate the work from the writer. I understand that this is crucial in literary critique. But there are seriously unprofessional parts of me that wonder about A.D. Miller (and since I'm not getting paid for this, being unprofessional now and then is probably inevitable). A BBC piece on Miller says: "Miller's own experiences in Russia were 'slightly more uneventful' than those of his fictional creation". It makes me wonder if he wishes that all this had happened to him. If he saw all the strip clubs and easy sex, the women he writes about as desperate to find a non-Russian husband, and wanted so much to have them for himself. Would it have mattered if those women had ripped him off, had hurt him, if he'd gotten to fulfill that Mata Hari dream? In the end, this girl is always a fiction. It feels like Miller is writing a fantasy for himself, a Booker nominated Penthouse Forum letter. “I can’t believe it happened to me. I was working in Russia…” While it is well written, at times clever, Snowdrops winds up existing in sexual cliché territory, and for me that's a bit tired and not the least challenging.

ETA: In the comments, I just proposed the idea that the letter Nick writes to his fiancée is in itself a fiction. That he's the dullest dude ever, and so he makes up this elaborate story to tell his girlfriend, so she'll find him more interesting. And if that's the case, if the book is that self-aware? Then it's fucking brilliant. And I'm willing, totally willing, to believe that's the case, if there's any evidence for it. I'd prefer fiction be good, after all

Whatever You Say I Am

2011-10-02T19:41:00.008-04:00

I was saying to a friend, recently, that I'm a lot harder on non-fiction than fiction. Even when I don't wholly enjoy a novel or short-story collection I don't tend to judge it too harshly. I like to talk fiction, move around inside it, make connections. With non-fiction, there's often a thesis in the setup (memoir isn't wholly excluded from this), and that invites critical inquisition of the text, even if the thesis as a whole is solid (see my unhappiness with Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright Sided). That's my theory on how I read, anyway.

The Psychopath Test danced right through all my argumentative tendencies, and stands as a solidly interesting read. Jon Ronson is an extremely talented writer and pure investigator. The Psychopath Test doesn't come from a single thesis, but rather the coalescing of several incidents and interviews that he'd done, which all seemed to make sense together in hindsight. For example, Ronson had interviewed "Tony" in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital for This American Life. Tony was living among serial killers and sex offenders as a consequence of claiming madness to get out of a jail sentence for aggravated assault. The psychiatrists at the time of his sentencing believed the quotes Tony had pulled from violent movies to be his own thoughts, and declared him insane. The NPR interview seemed pretty open and shut when I'd heard it years ago. Stupid kid does something stupid, and follows with stupid plot to Get Out of Jail Free. When he seems sane, the hospital thinks his treatment is working, and says they need to keep him. If he plays insane, he clearly needs to stay as well. Tony is stuck.

The Psychopath Test however, goes a bit further with Tony's story.
Seems Tony's doctors know very well that he faked his way into Broadmoor.

"Tony[...] did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison." [...]It was now the consensus. Tony's delusions --the ones he'd presented when he had been on remand in jail-- just, in retrospect, didn't ring true. [...]"Oh!" I thought, pleasantly surprised. "Good! That's great!" I had liked Tony when I met him but found myself feeling warier of him those past days so it was nice to have his story verified by an expert

However, the action of making up those stories in an attempt to escape prison, as well as many other indications have Tony diagnosed as a psychopath, according to the Hare Checklist.

But then I read Professor Maden's next line: "Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy."[...]Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

The genesis and applications of the Hare Checklist, named after and created by pioneering psychologist Bob Hare, are ostensibly the main focus of the book. Ronson gives a thorough introduction to the history of the treatment and diagnosis of psychopaths, with pertinent peripheral information about psychiatry/psychology — and its opponents — in general (there's a very interesting chapter on the history of the DSM, which is going into its fifth edition). Ronson then takes the checklist on the road and investigates whether psychopaths are disproportionately represented in the top ranks of corporate executives. The Psychopath Test refuses to have a central thesis, rather Ronson simply and entertainingly reports the facts as he can find them, and the events as they happen. Both Scientologists and psychiatrists are treated with fairness, and neither escape scrutiny. Ronson gives enough of himself, though, to keep the book engaging and avoid being dry recantation of names and dates. This is simply an excellent, well-researched non-partisan look at a specific subset of psychiatric definitions.

When I was in University I took a first-year psychology course as an option. One of the things our professor told us was that we would wind up diagnosing ourselves with all sorts of mental disorders when reading the text book. We were told to ignore this phenomenon (is there a name for it? I never knew), and do our best not to be concerned when we checked off symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder, or food related disorders. We were asked to leave naming of our psychoses and neuroses to the professionals. An interesting subtext of The Psychopath Test is how Jon Ronson begins to do just this, as he becomes more knowledgeable. No, he doesn't think he's a psychopath, but he discovers — he thinks — that he's in whatever the exact opposite category is. He's too anxious, too interested in other people, he feels fear more physically^*. At the same time, he begins diagnosing random people with psychopathy, after taking one class with Bob Hare. That, if anything, is one of the lingering and more important messages in The Psychopath Test: A little learning is a very dangerous thing.

^*It's theorized that psychopaths had a low or non-functioning amygdala. Once Ronson hears about this, he feels his go in to overdrive rather too often.

Looking In

2011-09-23T09:07:00.014-04:00

When Pigeon English was released early this year, we didn't know what would happen in London in August...

The narrative revolves around Harrison — Harri — an 11-year old boy, newly arrived to England from Ghana. He lives with his mother and older sister, while his father and baby sister have stayed behind. Harrison's family, like so many immigrant families, lives in a bad neighbourhood (in London), defined by crime and violence. Through the first-person narrative, Harrison retains an innocence and sense of wonder that seems to belong to someone several years younger. This is at times not exactly plausible, as when he seems to have absolutely no knowledge of human sexual activity. I remember being 11. I wasn't participating in anything, but I certainly knew some of the mechanics (and I can't just blame Jean M. Auel for that). Then again, perhaps the avenues which kids in Europe and North America learn about sex just didn't exist in Ghana; I can't claim to know anything about it. In other ways, the exaggerated innocence seems appropriate, as his class-mates are portrayed socially similar. The games and they way they play them sometimes seem, again, something younger kids would be interested in. (I should note, though, that by "innocent" I don't mean "simple.") The comparison has been made, favorably for Pigeon English, to Emma Donoghue's Room, with Harri judged an easier child narrator to read and accept. Readers often found Room's Jack both too precocious and annoying (I don't agree). Harri remains likeable and for the most part, age-appropriate (as above, if anything, he skews slightly young for his age). The Guardian review says

Kelman has already been much praised for his ability to write from an 11-year-old's perspective, but here, as often in the first half of the novel, Harri's voice feels laboured and faux-naïf.

I think most of this, aside from my issues with innocence, can be chalked up to Harri's difficulty using language in his new context. I think Stephen Kelman's writing is pretty clear on that.

While it's not explicit, one assumes that Harri's family is (in waves) moving to England for a "better life," but his flashbacks to time spent in his home country show that he is now much worse off. (Though this may be some of the troubling white framing of black experience as seen in The Help, or evoking a "noble savage" type.) Comparatively, London is dirty, violent, and crowded. People are selfish, preferring to harm rather than help others. The never-easing class divide in England cuts across colour and and country of origin, keeping a poisonous river between the have-nots and the have-too-much. The origins of the August 2011 London riots, it's been said, erupted from a feeling of absolute hopelessness, from the societal group of which Harri is now a member. Unlike the prevailing "You can be anything" message that American kids grow up with (erroneous or not), England likes to keep its classes separate. Given the historically abysmal record in the way England treats the poor, upward mobility isn't even considered; it's just assumed getting out is not possible. Near the end of the novel, the seniors in Harri's school write goodbye messages on each other's school shirts. Two pages are devoted just to these messages, and they illuminate the matter-of-fact acceptance of the fate of those without means. It doesn't even seem sad or angry, it just is. The messages read like any year-book: some are just names, some are jokes or bawdy quips. They begin^*:

GOOD LUCK KEEP IT REAL spud
NORTHWELL MANOR TILL I DIE TYRONE
TAKE IT EASY GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN naomi
DFC [the initials of a local gang]FUCK SCHOOL LEWSEY HILL R. PUSSIES

Then others start, interspersed with the sort above, with a new theme:

JUST ENOUGH EDUCATION TO PERFORM
repeat after me: DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?
DON'T PAY TAX, SELL DRUGS INSTEAD
SEE YOU AT THE JOB CENTRE
Be warned: the future doesn't need you![emphasis mine]

It feels almost prescient that mere months before the London Riots this novel would be published, capturing the soon-to-be-violent malaise of a demographic group so strongly. Harri, while a newcomer, shares a lot with his peers, and neighbours. Like him, most of the people in Pigeon English are essentially, easily good. For example, Terry Takeaway is a thief and a drunk, owner of a pitbull (hallmark of a "bad guy" in many places), but he's also on the lookout for Harri, willing to defend him from older kids for no other reason than it's intrinsically right. (The pitbull, Asbo, is revealed to be a loveable pup, and Harri enjoys playing with him immensely.) There are only a couple essentially bad characters in Pigeon English, and Kelman is careful to make them different as possible, to show that the hard, evil criminals of legend aren't the majority. When things go bad on a large scale, as in the August riots, it's often not because people have substandard ethics or upbringing (fuck you very much, David Cameron), but because they're pulled along, never having been allowed to know another way to be.

There's a load of films being made where filmmakers go to a council estate and 90 percent of the people there are functional—getting their kids ready for school, paying their taxes, working. And 10 percent are dysfunctional—and they go, "That's what we're going to make a film about."^*

^*I've attempted to replicate the changes in type on these pages of the novel, which indicate that there are different people writing each message.
^**Actor Eddie Marsan, interviewed by Jonathan Romney in The Independent, May 2, 2010. As quoted in Jon Ronson's The Pyschopath Test (210).
^***Also, I think I've figured out — for myself anyway — the "talking" pigeon character that seems to have caused so many readers so much trouble. He's supposed to be for Harri, as Harri is for the neighbourhood; an outsider looking in, with a perspective that illuminates the situation. I agree, though, it doesn't really work.

Wild Abandon

2011-09-14T22:08:00.016-04:00

My first experience with the work of Joe Dunthorne was watching the movie adaptation of Submarine. The movie is a bit off-kilter, slightly trippy, and seemingly coloured by remembrance. It’s also a bit uneven, and I was left not terrifically impressed. It was, then, with an open mind but a small amount of trepidation I began to read Dunthorne’s new novel, Wild Abandon. What I got was the usual outcome of the book vs movie duel: something much, much better on the page than on the screen.^*

Wild Abandon follows the lives of commune, or their preferred term “community,” members in Wales. Don and Freya are a middle-aged married couple, and half of the creating force behind the community. Janet, their school chum, and Patrick, former landlord and provider of startup capital, round out the founders. The community is in decline, after a decade or so or humming along. New members are hard to find, there aren’t many children.

Don, with his degree in film studies, is ever the actor reciting lines. He’s described as often seeming to have rehearsed things is his head, many times, before speaking. “Don preferred himself in front of the lens. In the same way that a miserable holiday, when viewed through its photographs, becomes a stream of joyful moments.” In a flashback sequence, he is away from the community and gets the call his wife is giving birth to their first child, Kate. He relishes the role of the immediately expectant father, racing back, practicing what he’ll say, dramatically, to the cop that pulls him over for speeding (and is saddened when it doesn’t happen). That he doesn’t make it in time to see Kate born is representative of his character. Freya is responsible in birth, as well as in death; she’s been dubbed the community’s “abattoir,” because she’s the only one who can actually kill and butcher animals. The sexual politics between Freya and Don are interesting: it’s the woman who works hard, and gets down to what has to be done, because there’s little choice; the man lives in the mind, making speeches and directing, while doing very little himself. This relationship isn’t atypical in literature or life; I’m thinking of the Great Male Author trope, with his long-suffering wife behind him, making financial and household arrangements while the artist needs his think-time.

Kate has her sights set on going to University elsewhere in the next year, and 11-year old son Albert is too smart yet not socialized enough. Kate escapes the community to the home of her boyfriend’s parents. Like most teenagers, she wants only what she doesn’t have while living with her parents (and this is echoed by boyfriend Geraint moving to the community later on). She seeks what she thinks will be a more interesting sort of discord.

Considering that Kate had never spent any time in a suburban home before, she had a highly developed understanding of what to expect; during her upbringing, her father had encouraged her to make the most of his film collection, which had a lot to say on that subject, including The Graduate, Edward Scissorhands, American Beauty, and The Ice Storm. One of the community's well-told stories was of Kate, aged ten, setting an alarm for herself to wake at 3 a.m. so that she could come downstairs and watch Poltergiest, the definitive suburban horror film.

In fact, what she finds is that life is pretty much humdrum no matter where you run to.

The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia's dark and seething underbelly, she had found its potbelly of contented boredom.

( In this way, Dunthorne reads a bit like a gentler, less satirically-minded Tom Perrota.)

Everyone in Wild Abandon is a bit like Kate, moving and shifting, enjoying the new but eventually searching for a new place that might be just a bit better: Kate eventually gets into Cambridge; her parents leaving London squats for the wilds of Wales; Patrick leaves the commune to once again work a full-time job and have an apartment; Freya wanting to leave Don and get Albert into regular school; Geraint joining the community. It’s reminiscent of the constant ebb and flow of city/suburban populations. Albert, not having the possibility of self-determined mobility at his age, turns to an Apocalypse scenario centered on a black hole for comfort. It’s child’s logic; if he never leaves his known world, the only possible change is for the world to end. Kate is the embodiment of that black hole—as her sphere increases (going to school outside the community, then leaving for the Three Crosses suburb, then going to college) the more Albert feels his world is ending.

Dunthorne has just the right descriptive simile or metaphor handy at all times. This isn’t as easy to pull off as you might think; the descriptor has to be contextual, so much so that it gives the reader a perfect idea of the scene at hand, without distraction. Dunthorne has this down to an art, and it’s an integral part of his style. This might be annoying in the hands of a lesser writer, but I only noticed the comparatives so often because of how perfect they were. Early on in the novel, one of the founding members of the community, Patrick, has a paranoid episode after ingesting both marijuana and mushrooms. Fleeing the community on a cold night in just underwear, he tears through the brush, coming out into a suburban street in an empty new development. As he succumbs to hypothermia he falls onto the “road shaped like a thermometer -- a turning circle at one end.” Not only is this an accurate visual, it’s loaded with symbolism. The thermometer, of course, speaks of temperature and Patrick’s loss of body heat. The choice of a cul-de-sac, though, also represents an ending, the bottom of the bag, or in Intervention speak, rock bottom. Patrick quits the community, and gets clean (after a last hurrah of enjoying hospital sponsored morphine drips). Later, Kate takes her university qualifying exams:

There was something enjoyable about the tarot of turning over an exam paper: a whole gymnasium full of people reading their fortunes.

Again, this is perfect on a couple levels. Exam results do tell the future, but on a smaller and more physical level, the turning of the papers is indeed very like turning over tarot cards. It makes the moment slower than I remember when I took my exams, and more lovely. Wild Abandon is like that sometimes, making the reader stop sometimes, over the small moments, looking at the small parts of life in a new way. That’s what good literature does.

Kate’s first memory of cartoons is watching “Steamboat Willie.” She’s struck by the pile of potatoes Willie is tasked to peel, a pile that never seems to end or get any smaller. It gives her nightmares. The petite-bourgeois lives in Wild Abandon are similar in that, not getting ahead, just making lateral movements. (The commune, while at times hardscrabble and always ad-hoc still falls into this category, having been created by a property owner and three holders of liberal arts degrees). Comfortable survival is the same on the commune as in the suburbs. The novel’s title, perhaps, relates to those small moments which stand outside just-living, like the two rave parties depicted (an accidental one in the past, a party for Kate’s birthday that got out of hand, and the one that climaxes the book, which is engineered to generate interest in the community). Perhaps, though, the title is sarcastic, because no matter the location, being middle-class has conformity clauses.

Reviewed from advanced reading copy, courtesy Penguin Books Canada.
^*Yeah, I get that they’re different works. ^**
^** And I’m glad I haven’t read Submarine, actually. The Guardian review did that thing that The G&M review did with The O’Briens, talking about how the first book was much better. Sometimes, it’s good to start with the second book?

Making 9/11 All About Me*

2011-09-11T12:04:00.009-04:00

In the last ten years I've finished university, been married and divorced, moved cities, traveled across the Pacific twice, got out of retail, got out of publishing, made and lost friends, found a great love, and chose to get sterilised. It's been a big decade.

In 2001 I was 25, living alone and in my last semester of university. My routine was as it had been for years: get up after about five hours sleep, attend one or two classes, race home and change to go to work till 11, study, five hours sleep. I didn't interact with people at school, because I never really had time. Class, work, sleep. So on September 11^th I went to school as usual. I had one class that morning, so I likely woke up around 9 am, without listening to the radio or turning on the TV, just racing to school. The professor didn't mention anything. There were no scenes of people crying and being comforted. There weren't TVs in the hallways or classrooms tuned to CNN. Everything was perfectly normal. People were probably talking to each other about it, but I hadn't talked to anyone that day, other than the people serving coffee. They didn't say anything. Maybe they assumed I already knew. I had no idea.

In writing that, I think I've just come to understand the biggest mystery of my whole 9/11 story. People asked "How could you not know? How could people not have said something about it?" I think the answer is timing. By the time I left my house, and got my first coffee of the day, it was 9:30, mountain time. The towers had collapsed an hour before. It was already done, and maybe at that point it was unlikely you'd say to a stranger, "Have you heard?" Because everyone would have heard. Except, I hadn't heard.

I got home from school a little after 1 pm, 3 pm eastern time. That's when I turned on my TV. I remember this part clear as anything. The first thing I saw was some politician or another saying "America is still the greatest nation in the world." My first thought, as a Canadian used to complaining about the cultural imperialism and hubris of the United States, was Oh, these fucking Americans! And then the scene switched to footage of Tower One collapsing, Tower Two just rubble and smoke behind it. Something was very, very wrong.

What everyone already knew, I learned six hours after the fact. Was I the last person to hear about 9/11? I sat on the floor in front of the TV and watched the highlight reel, because that's what it was by that point. The second plane strike, the collapse, the people fleeing in terror. I called my then-boyfriend, later husband, who was living in New Jersey. I hadn't been out there yet, so I didn't know if where he lived was that sort of "across the river from Manhattan" New Jersey, I didn't know how widespread the attacks were, how bad the national damage was. He was fine, he told me not to worry, everything was fine. I don't remember being emotional when I called. I was too confused.

After talking to the boyfriend, I was finally able to start putting things together, and I got online. Livejournal was the preferred social network at that time, and there was a lot of material to get through. People had been posting events as they happened, and the fear and confusion of watching it all go down in real time was a live wire in every word. I had friends in Toronto who'd been evacuated from their workplace. I had Calgary friends stranded in Toronto, because all flights had been grounded. At some point I realised a Calgary friend was in New York City that day, and no one had heard from him. I'm sad to say that this is when I started crying; the possibility of my loved one caught up in it all made it real and human, finally. I suppose it may be possible that's when the shock wore off enough to let in some comprehension of the real scale of what I'd been seeing. I called work, because I was so scared for my friend, told them I couldn't leave until someone had heard from him. Work understood. And so I waited. Around 4 pm Calgary time, I learned he'd been in contact with Toronto people. He drove out of NYC that morning, before rush hour to avoid traffic, and had gotten stuck at the border trying to get back into Canada. The borders, of course, were total chaos. He'd been in the WTC the day before. He still has the ticket stub dated September 10, 2001. They'd gone a day earlier than planned.

I went to work, at the 7-11, shell-shocked, two hours late. My loved ones were accounted for, I could go on. It was a weird night. A special edition of the paper came in around 9 o'clock. Customers were infrequent, and quiet. Everyone, by now, knew. Everything was still up in the air, there were no answers yet. We were so far away from what happened, yet we had tilted a little, and it took a while to stop feeling like every day was going to change us again.

In the past couple weeks I've been obsessed with watching 9/11 coverage. I found a site that has archived the live feeds from CNN, CBC, and the BBC from that entire morning. I still have such a hard time understanding that day, because I missed so much of it. I literally slept through the events of 9/11, and it creates this need in me to fill in the missing pieces. I've seen some people talk of a memorial fatigue this week, and I get that. I, however, don't suffer from it. If anything, I require more information, more pictures, more taped phone calls.

If I remember right, it's 10:28 eastern time that Tower One collapses. I watched the five seconds of that on the CBC feed, over and over. They're saying they don't know what happened to Tower Two, because it's in the background, and then Tower One goes. You hear the entire newsroom make a sound... it's a horror movie sound. It's the sound of a heart and a brain breaking into pieces simultaneously. I wasn't there for it, so I needed to feel it, repeatedly. I don't know what that's about.

I was in NYC last month. The PATH train I took in from Jersey City lets out at WTC. On a day I spent alone, just wandering Manhattan, I spent some time at St. Paul's. Hard to imagine how it escaped damage, let alone total destruction, being just feet from Ground Zero. That whole block, even on that sunny day ten years later, full of tourists and citizens going about their day as normal, is a heavy place. I took pictures of Revolutionary era gravestones, while America's involuntary mass burial ground sat behind construction-boards in front of me. Heavy, yet peaceful. In that place, in those moments, all I could feel was hope that peace had come for all those souls, and the ones who loved them.

I'm sure, though, I'm not alone when I say that I still don't understand any of it.

Photo: James Nachtwey, Time.

^*This post isn't about the politics of 9/11, the aftermath, or the reasons why. This is just a personal reflection on that day. It's my answer to "where were you when?"

Easy Reads

2011-09-07T16:23:00.007-04:00

This week, the Booker Shortlist and the Giller Longlist were announced. Thus, my library queue got crazy again, and there's going to be a whole lot of Literature up in here pretty soon. It seems appropriate, then, that I just polished off a total snack-book, Emma Forrest's Cherries in the Snow^*.

Having read Forrest's memoir, Your Voice in my Head just recently, I was a bit distracted by knowing which details of Cherries were "write what you know," and unavoidably making conjecture as to which other details were true. Forrest's personality is evident in Cherries, which is smart, funny, and just slightly raunchy. The main character, Sadie, is a young, hip English Jewish girl living in New York (as is Forrest). As the novel begins she's in a relationship with an older man, a journalist. I believe Forrest mentioned a long-time relationship with an older playwright in Your Voice. I began to wonder how much of the stilted sex life in the first part of the book was fiction, and how the older man (men?) in her life felt about that.
The novel is a chick-lit romp through makeup and love, with a feisty eight-year old thrown in. No startling new territory here. Kate Carraway's The Globe & Mail review of Your Voice in My Head says of Forrest's earlier fiction

I and other twentysomething disaffecteds read half-sunk in lukewarm bathwater, searching for instruction and connection with her characters, all of them good bad girls, messy and wanting.

This intrigued me, but I probably would have enjoyed this book a lot more in my teens and 20s. For me, it was possible to believe in those years that a man like the love-interest Marley was on the horizon. Marley is a prince-charming composite, perfect for Emma Forrest, BEST LOVAH EVER (really? at 24 you get this? really?) with a dark distant-past, enough cash to go around, who falls in love with our protagonist almost instantly, but not slavishly. Ten years ago I could easily dream that I too would one day have a glamourous job at a cosmetics company in the big city... oh, shit; I do have a job a cosmetics company in the big city. Anyway, what I mean is, this is all delightful fantasy stuff but at this point in my life Cherries is the sort of thing that entertains only while I'm reading it. To really care about a book like this one probably needs to be able to feel like they could put themselves into the main character and I was wholly unable to do so. I really, really loved Forrest's memoir, and I look forward to any forthcoming work. I suspect it will speak to me more than Cherries in the Snow.

Something I never, ever stop loving is a big old multi-generational epic. Peter Behrens' The O'Briens is a good choice if you're in the mood for such. The reviews I've seen mention his first (and, they say, better) novel The Law of Dreams, which won the Governor General's award. Since I haven't read that one I haven't any comparative complaints. The O'Briens begins before WWI and ends in the 1960s, following the fortunes of Joe O'Brien and his extended family. Again, from The Globe and Mail:

We see no consequence more dire than his wife being angry with him, but even then we’re not sure whether she wants to leave him because of his drinking binges or because she has fallen in love with J. Krishnamurti.

That's valid, but I didn't really mind the lack of big drama. Some bad things happen, but everyone's pretty much okay in the end, and I don't have a particular issue with that treatment. The O'Briens is a story, not an opera.
I read a lot of Judith Krantz and Barbara Taylor Bradford novels years ago, and the way The O'Briens deals mostly with the lives of the privileged felt similar. Some might take that comparison as an insult, I don't know, but it's certainly not meant that way. Those books, as with The O'Briens, were easy and engaging, over 500 pages and 50-plus fictional years.
As for quibbles, I do have a couple. The O'Briens is most interesting in its early going, usually when focusing on the matriarch, Iseult, and it does suffer sometimes from possible behavioral anachronisms (for example, I'm not sure how easy it would be for a woman to leave her husband and flee the country with her children in 1931, or if many women would even think of the possibility). As well, there was a stand-out magical sperm phallacy (I coined it that day, yes the "ph" is intentional) early on that had quite a few of my Twitter pals giggling^**. Otherwise, it's a fine read, and sometimes just "fine" is exactly what I want.

Okay, awardies and fall lists. Let's do this. *rolls up sleeves*

^*That review is a random Google find, and a lovely little review it is!
^**My tweet: "Her firm white belly loaded with mystery." Oh bugger off, it's JIZZ not the Arc of the Covenant.

Teenage Dirtbag

2011-08-28T11:21:00.006-04:00

Mansfield Press imprint, A Stuart Ross Book, kindly sent me a review copy of Mongrel after my post about author Marko Sijan's piece in CNQ. As I said in the comments to that post, I was honestly curious to see what the author of "The Gutter Years" would do with a longer, fictional format (which, of course, was the point of "The Gutter Years": get attention for the long-delayed novel). So thanks, Stuart.

Mongrel follows the lives of five teenagers, and their circles, who attend the same high-school in Windsor, Ontario. Each part of the novel is narrated by one of the five, and traces their interactions with each other. The Windsor of Mongrel is a dark, dirty, and depressing place. I've never been to Windsor, so I can't say for sure if this is accurate or not, though Alexander McLeod's Light Lifting seems a more realistic record of the place. Still, if you're stuck in a place of unhappiness as a teenager, things do tend to seem more apocalyptic than they actually are. The teens in Mongrel are very, very messed up. Several come from abusive or neglectful homes. School is ultra-violent, with no intervention from faculty.

I couldn't help but think of (the truly wonderful) Lemon while reading Mongrel and comparing their versions of desperately downtrodden teendom. In Lemon, though, you had someone to root for. Lemon faced a world much like the one in Mongrel, under constant threat of violence, amidst poverty and suspect parenting, but she was also a character you wanted to succeed. Lemon is a novel with real heart, and compassion. Mongrel feels more like pushing buttons and acting out, less from rebellion than implacable aggression.

Sijan is very adept at writing first person teenage narrative. The language through most of Mongrel is very juvenile, and veers often into needless "gross out" territory. But, that's fine. Actually, it works very well, for what Sijan is—I think —trying to do here. Teenage boys really are pretty gross, and they are very convincingly rendered here. There are also a couple chapters dedicated to female characters. The first, Sera, is pretty far up her own ass, which I totally buy. There are always plenty of those people in high-school who think they've got it all figured out already^*. It's the hubris of youth. The other, Sophie, is at the opposite end of the spectrum, self-hating and anorexic. This, too, is convincing. The female teens in the book, by the way, are portrayed no better or worse than the males. Everyone is equally fucked up in high-school. Of course, they're all equally unlikeable too, and the reader is left without anyone to care about (again, unlike Lemon). That's not really a problem in itself; I'm sure plenty of successful novels are filled with jackasses. For this reader, however, an anchor for empathy is helpful. Least well-treated is Sophie's mother, who is depicted as taking home random men, and teen-aged boys (Sophie's classmates), for the purposes of anal-only sex. It's suggested this is a result of the trauma of her husband being not-secretly in love with her not-gay father. There's something really off about this characterization, though most of the parents in Mongrel are better written, and in some cases are the only locus of compassion and decency.

There's supposed to be some subtext in Mongrel about culture and class clash, and fitting in, but it gets drowned out by passages like

[...]she always had ten to fifteen zits on her forehead and chin, ripe whiteheads filled with pus, which I'd rub my face against when we were humping. When they'd pop, I'd lick them up.

She's all possessed with her left eye twitching and she wraps her hand around mine, and starts jerking me off. She pulls her eyebrows in like bat's wings and speeds up and it feels wicked so I tilt my head back against the wall and close my eyes and keep playing with her Zulu tits[.]

The message I get in the end, is that everyone is horrible, and will continue to be horrible through the generations. Parents fuck you up, no matter how good or bad they are to you, and you will propagate more fucked up kids in turn. As the books ends we learn Gunther, the pus-licker above, has impregnated Sophie. He discovers Sophie's condition after having anal-only sex with her Mom, then stealing into Sophie's room to find her barely alive, reading her suicide note... oh, come on. I'm trying here, but some things are just a bit ridiculous.

It will probably come as no surprise that I didn't like Mongrel. This book isn't for me, I am not its audience. I'm not sure who the audience would be, precisely.

^*Surely, there are people of every age like this, and no one person has everything figured out. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that teenagers aren't too young to start on this game, though there is something about the teenage ego that still finds it hard to see past their own nose. HI, I AM AN OLD LADY. GET OFF MY LAWN.

RIP Jack Layton

2011-08-23T10:31:00.004-04:00

I've been trying to write something about Jack Layton for a day now. I could never do him justice, so this is just a small thing inspired by this stunning panorama of the messages of love and respect at Toronto City Hall.

Maybe it's just me, but isn't this how we should feel about the people we elect to lead us? Shouldn't we trust them with more than our tax bill? Isn't it more important that our leaders believe in all of us, rich and poor, than in separating us by income? I realise it's a bit Pollyanna, but I can't wrap my head around why people accept anything less. Yet they do, and they will. In the meantime, others will continue to do Jack Layton's work, and spread his message that we can always do better than we have before, as Canadians. That's the family he was always talking about; I've never felt it more keenly than now.

The mourning, it seems, has not yet passed.

Patrick Corrigan, The Toronto Star

Someone Wrote a Book About Calgary*

2011-08-21T18:51:00.009-04:00

A couple months ago, I was reading Shawn Micallef's tweets about his time in Calgary with a critical and cynical eye. I thought he got it right, most of the time, and though I could be nitpicky about some details in the tweets, I won't. I've always said that Calgary can be fun if you're a visitor.

Of course, I know Calgary in a different way. I lived there for the first 26 years of my life and I return every 1-2 years to visit my Dad, my cat, the house I grew up in, and take the drive to Banff to see my ailing Mother. I went back in early June this year, to a place I recognize less and less. Maybe it's from living in Toronto so long, I've forgotten just how incredibly aggressive the whole vibe is in Calgary. For the first time, I felt uneasy in my hometown. Walking down 17^th Ave, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I felt menaced. The quiet at my Dad's house, in an early 70s suburb backed by Nose Hill Park (at right^**), was eerie more than comforting. I looked over my shoulder a lot. Driving, as Micallef put it, is "no fun. No fun." I saw some cyclists attempt to ride on these hostile streets, and my hats off to them. If all of those complaining about the lack of bicycle infrastructure in Toronto could see what these bold Calgarians deal with, they'd be amazed at how good we have it^†.

I did take a bit of issue with the Spacing post that went up later, only in that I felt the reach could have been a bit broader. I lived in one of the neighbourhoods just out of downtown, after moving out of my parents' house. And yes, they can be lovely. In fact, I returned to that neighbourhood several times during my last trip. Micallef mentions Crescent Heights, which was the aspirational housing of kids from the north-western suburbs. Mount Royal was where we wandered, after-bar, Elbow River in the moonlight. But go a little further and things change. Each neighbourhood homogeneously proclaims its decade as you move further away from the core, "mixed" architecture being an anathema. The ability to walk to much of anything is gone. My parents' house is 2km from the nearest grocery store. Try that with a bag-full of canned goods. It's not that the Calgarian suburbs are a nutritional desert; there isn't a convenience store any closer. It's just house, after house, after house. I'd like to see what Micallef would make out of this wasteland. The 'burbs are mandated to look uniform.

It's this sort of environment in which Monoceros takes place. The pressure for uniformity in the Calgary suburbs extends, too, to the people who live there. Calgary is hyper-masculine, and to step out of line is to become extremely vulnerable. There's little support for those who won't fall into place.

What I love about Monoceros, is how Suzette Mayr set a book in Calgary, without using any overt cowboy tropes. Mayr, interestingly, has most of the narrative take place in February. You'd think it would be difficult to write about a prairie winter, or perhaps monotonous to read about one, but Mayr's lucky to have Calgary to work with, with its ever-changing temperature. The Chinooks that roll in and out through Monoceros affect the moods and actions of the characters, like the Santa Ana winds do in a Raymond Chandler story.

If the weather in Calgary is totally unpredictable, the prejudices that run through the populous are easy to call. This is why Max and Walter hide their relationship (which is a marriage in everything but name, right down to the boredom of familiarity) for over a decade, to the point of maintaining separate residences in name only, lest they be fired from their shared Catholic high-school workplace. When Patrick Furey kills himself, it's partially due to the knowledge that navigating this world, when his classmates have begun to clue into his sexuality, will be too difficult. The boy he loves, Ginger, has gone cold, after conducting a secret affair. Ginger, too, knows the risks are too great. Calgary is a city infused with testosterone, and enforces a strict code of conduct. This isn't to say there aren't out people there, but to be out is sometimes a luxury that some can't afford. It's still this way; tall, thin, black-wearing friends of mine still get "fag-rolled" simply for looking like something other.

Monoceros is solidly a book about Calgary, even if it is rarely explicit about it. Mayr understands very well the hetero-normative crush of the suburbs, which take up more than 90-percent of Calgary's area, and at least as much of its collective consciousness.

^*See, also: "No One Writes Books About Calgary."
^**That photo, by the way, was taken at 8:30 pm in early June. When you leave for a while, it becomes wonderful and confusing how late the light stays.
^†What Calgary does have, is a lot of off-road trails, which are more recreational in intent, though I suspect some do get used for commutes out of the suburbs.

Stronger Voice

2011-08-14T10:16:00.013-04:00

This is yet another Lainey recommendation, but it's likely I would have picked it up anyway: putting Millais' Ophelia on the cover is a good way to get my attention^*. And it's not just an allegory. Emma Forrest talks about Ophelia in her introduction to Your Voice in My Head. She was obsessed by the painting as a teen, riding her bike to the Tate to see it every weekend. It's clear early on that Forrest is my kind of gal.

There's something about a story of mental illness that draws me, though I'm often left frustrated and disappointed. Such memoirs often feel congratulatory (about the illness, not the recovery), and indulgent. I suppose it's easy for me to say, because I've comparatively not suffered much from bad brain chemistry, but I'm often left with the feeling that the illness is held up as the redeeming feature of the author's personality. The illness makes them "special," the illness is why we should pay attention, or the illness is why they're an artist in the first place. And maybe all of that's true, but it's also annoying. Not everyone with a mental illness is an artist (though I suppose there's the argument that many artists are mentally ill). Some people with mental illness are just as dull as anyone else. That's another reason I really like Emma Forrest. This book is about a particularly dark time in her life, but it's always extremely self-aware. Forrest is smart, talented, and funny first. It's a neat trick, too, because the book really is about her relationship to mental illness: her cutting, bulimia, mania, and depression. These traits, however, don't define Emma; her bipolar status is simply another part of her, not the sum total of her. This is a hopeful and important message, I think, to anyone struggling through diagnosis and treatment: your illness is not the entirety of you. Other memoirs might fail in this, making the illness the star, and the writer simply the host organism. (To be fair, I'm sure that in the middle of any mental illness it feels—more, probably is—all-consuming.)

Your Voice in My Head has gotten a lot of attention, because Forrest goes into great detail about her relationship with Colin Farrell (whom she does not name, but the world knows). I don't need to say much on that score, other than this is just one more thing that makes Forrest's experience very relateable: we haven't all dated movie stars, but a lot of us dated That Guy^†. That Guy comes on very strong, feels every emotion full-force, and then one day it's just done. And as all this is happening, Forrest's much treasured therapist, Dr. R, unexpectedly dies.

In a Turkish museum, Forrest has an hallucinogenic/imaginary conversation with the deceased Dr R, about his death, and the death of her relationship. "Losing you both was only the practice pain, wasn't it? For my mum and dad..." Her mind's Dr. R agrees. It's from this conversation the book takes its title. It's appropriate, as it's the most poignant moment, in a memoir full of honesty, intelligence, big emotion, and all-encompassing humour (which never feels out of place, even in the depths of emotional despair).

'When it happens,' he asks me, 'what will get you through?'
'Friends who love me.'
'And if your friends weren't there?'
'Music through headphones.'
'And if the music stopped?'
'A sermon by Rabbi Wolpe.'
'If there was no religion?'
'The mountains and the sky.'
'If you leave California?'
'Numbered streets to keep me walking.'
'If New York falls into the ocean?'
Your voice in my head.

^*The Canadian edition has Ophelia on the cover. Other editions don't seem to. Shame. It's a great image, and an important one to the author, that is not only the topic of the introduction, but a totem that Forrest carries through her life and references several times.
^**While I haven't mentioned it, this post is tagged "Jewish" because her religion is an important part of Emma Forrest's life, and she does talk about it in Your Voice in My Head. If you've got any inclination in that direction, the description of Rabbi Wolpe's sermon that comprises the entirety of Chapter 36 is a lovely and moving moment.
^†Or, I suppose, That Girl. Though given cultural norms, a dude who will feel is supposed to be compelling, while a girl that feels is needy, and to be avoided. YMMV, as always.

Easy

2011-07-26T11:00:00.011-04:00

It's summertime, and the urge to work is about nil. Blogging is (light) work, all volunteer. I do put effort into this scrap of the internet, though June and July have been too much Get Off the Computer, Asshole. I've been reading outside, I've been running, I've been socialising... it's been glorious. I've also just finished a book that was a delightful breeze at the end of my Nuclear Poetry^*/Holocaust Escaping^** Inadvertent Summer of Anansi.

Iain Reid had a piece in the National Post last week, called Why there’s still a place in the world for literary readings, in which he talks about various readings he's done, including Toronto's last Literary Death Match. While Reid talks about how readings are a good thing from the author's point of view, as a reader I value readings as well. I've certainly become interested in books I had no previous awareness of after an author appearance (the extraordinary Monoceros being but one; post coming soon, I hope). I was in the audience at the Toronto Literary Death Match, and picked up One Bird's Choice based solely on Iain's reading that night (which was not a piece from the book).

I didn't blog about it, but I read George Eliot for the first time this year (yeah, yeah). One of the things that surprised me, is how funny she can be. I almost never laugh out loud at media (though I often do with other people). Books, especially, I absorb more than I react to. I laughed reading George Eliot. And it was with surprise and joy that I laughed, not just chuckled, in several places reading One Bird's Choice. Reid's humour is equal parts silly and acerbic, much like my own, so the book and I had an easy relationship.

There's more going on, however, than just funny anecdotes about the strangeness of living with one's parents after years out of the house. Reid does make off-the-cuff mentions of his parents aging: the weird habits they've gotten into, their forgetfulness, their aging bodies. Given my own experiences with an aging parent, I kept expecting something awful to happen to one or both parents. Thankfully, nothing does. Reid doesn't really follow up with how he feels about these new versions of his parents, and it's the only thing I feel is missing from One Bird's Choice. Then again, I might be more sensitive to these matters. Or it's possible that really engaging with the feelings resulting from watching one's parents age would have changed the mood of the book too much. One Bird's Choice was clearly not meant to be a downer.

It's clear the time Reid spent with his parents has been wonderfully beneficial for him; the monetary necessity of his living situation has turned into a psychic and creative rejuvenation. He's been able to turn that into a good fun read, and just the antidote to all the heaviness I've been absorbing lately. (It also made me miss my Dad a lot.)

^*Bloom. Holy. Shit. I'm not much of a poetry reader, so I'm not sure I can adequately comment on this book. But, good, yes, so good.
^**Far to Go, which had language so beautiful, it made me gasp. To wit:

[A]fter the baby died she could not turn over in bed or her severed heart would fall out of her chest cavity. She lay on her back with her breast ripped open while the wolves bloodied their snouts in her grieving.

Also, it was announced today that Alison is on the Booker longlist! Congrats!

A Turd of Hope, A Steaming Pile

2011-05-17T21:42:00.022-04:00

When I first read "The Gutter Years" in the latest issue of CNQ, I just thought "gross," and moved on. Then the Globe and Mail chose to highlight this piece over the weekend, and I felt the need to make a rebuttal. The G&M notes the "refreshing and brutal frankness" of "The Gutter Years." Refreshing is certainly not the word I'd use. Though Marko Sijan's willingness to dirty some names is certainly uncommon in a small industry where everyone knows everyone else, I wouldn't consider that a revolutionary cool breeze. The rest is not exactly brutal honesty. Rather, it's bragging about "bad" behaviour, though it never comes across as the sort of decadent debauching the quoted Oscar Wilde might approve of.

Disclaimer: I do love CNQ for a lot of reasons, not least of which is its dedication to having very diverse pieces on theme in each issue. As a consequence, not everyone is going to love every piece. That's the point. This piece, I did not love, to put it mildly.

My first impression of "The Gutter Years" was that it was a Henry Miller hack (despite Sijan's note that Faulkner was his hero). Upon second reading, the judgment remains. Miller wrote real, intense filth, full of sex and destitute depravity. Sijan tries to be a tough guy that gets a lot of pussy, while admitting that Mommy and Daddy still pay the rent. Tossing in the odd superfluous scatological reference ("he'd given me just enough to float my turd of hope") does not real filth make. Friends, Miller is alright by me; filth in literature is alright by me, great even. Sijan is just posing.

Do me, Henry.

Miller begged for money too, but one never thinks that he's able to just call up the 'rents and have them bust him out of squalor. Sijan's piece reads almost like a Pulp song: "You could call your Dad/He could/Stop it all." There's no real struggle, just the assumption that slumming it might give Sijan some material, and ways to continue to act like a rebellious teenager. Even his one long-term partner is picked to make Mom cringe. The love interest is from Mexico, and he has decided to return to her country to live with her.

My parents tried to dissuade me from moving to Mexico: "A dangerous place," according to Mom, "full of ignorant peasants." When I showed her a picture of Alma, she said, "Oh, she's really Mexican."

He doesn't bother to disagree. Sijan's treatment of Alma, the woman he supposedly loves, is pretty loathsome. In a culture where a woman living unmarried with a man is—by Sijan's account— a pretty big black mark, he tosses her aside when it looks like things will work out with his novel back in Canada. And the only cited reason for not cheating on her is not his "love," but his feeling of being "[s]hamed and castrated for lacking her father's integrity." In the end, it's suggested that she's a bit off. I think. The scenes of their final time together don't really make much sense, but I'll give Sijan a break and assume that he meant to do that, to insinuate that at the time, Alma wasn't making much sense either. Then again, she had to go back to her town with a big strike against her. I wonder what became of her.

The Globe also chose to quote the first bit I found extremely troubling:

I was very busy teaching English as a second language and having sex with my Japanese, Korean, Brazilian and Mexican students.

Now, I don't care if you're heading up a yoga class, or teaching a graduate English course: fucking your students is pretty wrong. There's a power differential there. Those can be sexy, sure. Power games are common role play themes. But taking advantage of that power differential in real life is creepy; bragging about it is douchebaggery. To Sijan, though, women are just there to be used. The women in his life are either fucked, or handy go-betweens that can get his book seen by publishers. The only ones that don't fall into these two categories receive poor treatment: Anne McDermid is slandered with the insinuation ("The rumour was") that she's got a casting couch for young male authors—he accuses her of hitting on him, but he declines because, ew, cougars with fake hair colour and fake eyebrows! Tamara Faith Berger becomes a bad writer based on nothing but her reaction to his sexual invitation.

I tried to hit on her but she took no interest in me. Good. Your book is shit. I hadn't read it.

At this point I need to wonder about Sijan's purported sexual magnetism: if you're so fuckable that all these ESL students are letting you have their way with them, why are none of the four pictures in the article of you? I mean, yes, Russell Smith is pretty, but let's see your face, irresistible one^*. Women would die without you, right?

Sijan draws Smith into conversation at a party, telling him of the crazy bitch ex-girlfriend who threatened to kill herself, should they break up. Weirdly, Sijan declines to name this ex-girlfriend (probably because she put out). Smith would like to know the identity of this mystery crazy woman, but Sijan is a cock tease. Really he should know better, since he enjoys Smith's "honest explorations of male sexuality." He thinks. He hasn't actually read any of the books.

There's a lot of casual racism in "The Gutter Years" as well. While Sijan is living in Mexico, he refuses to learn the language, which is high irony for an ESL instructor. He finds work teaching English to Mexican kids that he dares call "spoiled and arrogant" while still getting a stipend from his parents. Everything in Mexico is dirty, but not the fun kind, and is whittled down to the presence of roaches, Alma included. In a ridiculously sloppy passage, he compares to the clicking of a mouse to the sound of a cockroach twice within a few lines. Best of all, that cockroach of memory "scuttled between [Alma's] legs." Subtle! On another note, if your friend from Pakistan calls himself a "Paki" that does not give you license to use the term "Paki food" a few paragraphs later. No 'hood pass for you, kiddo.

But so what, right? He treats women like shit. He also hasn't got anything nice to say about Sam Hiyate or Ed Sluga, the two men who are really the focus of this piece. These are the guys who hold Sijan's first novel in their hands. These are the guys who can't get it published, and are the source of frustration for years. There's real venom for them in "The Gutter Years" and understandably so. Sijan is caught is a terrifically frustrating situation, in limbo forever, with the only piece of work he's completed.

I saw myself as a victim whose drive to succeed had been crushed by publishing industry charlatans.

Despite the description of this feeling as one of "epic delusion," I'd argue given the tone and content of "The Gutter Years," he's still feeling this way. Yet in the end, they're forgiven.

It took me a long time to understand that Sam didn't betray me. He was a friend and mentor who introduced me to an exciting world and facilitated many happy memories. [...] As for Ed, his "personal crisis" could have involved any number of issues, and he may have been powerless against the juggernaut of his own dysfunction

Hey man, it's okay, I understand. Buds? I'm still wondering what happened to Alma.
* * *
I hesitated to write this post, because inevitably I'll be told I've missed the point. I've tried to find one, really, I have. Unlike the G&M writer, I didn't find anything new and interesting here; it's the same tired Entitled Dude^** attitude I've been exposed to time and time again. The piece isn't shocking or ground-breaking, or even that well-written. It's just, to reiterate, gross. I get that Sijan's looking at the audience with big eyes saying, "I've been a vewy baaaad boy!" But so what?

Why do I give someone like Henry Miller a pass, when Marko Sijan just makes me feel slimed? I think part of it is authenticity. Marko's just slumming it. There's no artistic integrity here, he's just a filth tourist, and worse, he's no good at it. Telling me you fuck isn't dirty; everyone fucks—and everyone poops. (Hopefully, "we had sex in the manner of dogs" was meant to be hilarious.) Smoking pot isn't depraved, it's the Canadian national pass-time (and pretty benign at that). Slagging random CanLit names is just sour grapes. The rest is just sexist, classist, racist bullshit.

Sijan does note throughout the piece that he's aware his ego is large, and that he acts in ways that feed it. However, "The Gutter Years" is no mea culpa. There's absolutely no indication that Sijan is any less of a dick (and showing some sympathy for the dudes that fucked your career over doesn't save your soul when everyone else is still under the bus), and he doesn't apologise. He doesn't have to, of course. But if not, then why does this piece exist at all? One can argue that it's one man's look back at his attempts to create that decadent life, to be in the "gutter but looking at the stars," and failing in that pursuit. Why else mention his inability to provide for himself, his ego, his acknowledgment he was a liar? If this is the brutal honestly I'm supposed to admire, I'm not buying it. Admitting you're an asshole doesn't automatically make you interesting. You need to be interesting, asshole.

This character is at once so vile and so boring, that the admissions don't mitigate judgment, like I assume they're supposed to. Again, it just seems like he's bragging, rather than acknowledging his shortcomings. Worst, in the end, I just don't give a shit. (I don't give a shit enough to write 1500 words, right?) Probably, the piece exists mostly to promote the fact that his book is finally being published. Because as we all know, sensation gets attention, and I've played right into it.

^*Oh, there you are. "Marko’s two specialties are in helping students develop proficiency in oral and written communication." IYKWIM!
^**Note this is a specific Dude Type. I'm not saying all men have the same entitlement issues. However, this Entitled Dude is not an uncommon worldview.

The Little Lady Pt 2: Elizabeth Siddal

2011-05-16T10:06:00.009-04:00

I was first introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in a second year English lit course called "Victorian Sexuality in Poetry and Painting." It was taught by an elderly Brit who looked like he'd been there, and had decided to tell us the tale. Despite his sometimes meandering lectures (I remember he'd often veer off into talking about Marlene Dietrich), he had such amazing knowledge of the subject, and a real obvious love for the era. It was infectious. Soon, we were all in thrall with Tennyson, William Morris, Waterhouse, Burne-Jones^*, and Dante Rossetti. Especially Rossetti, because he had that fantastic macabre tale attached to him: when his wife died, he buried his unpublished poems with her, then exhumed her years later to get the poems back. It is said that when Elizabeth Siddal's casket was opened it was discovered that her hair had continued to grow after death, filling the casket with red-gold. We saw slides of Beata Beatrix^** in that class, we looked at some of Siddal's sketches and self-portraits, and we read as many of her poems as were available (few exist and are rarely anthologized). It was impossible for me not to fall for Elizabeth Siddal's tragic, romantic legend.

It's the stories and myths surrounding Siddal, and the way she's portrayed visually by male artists that draws people in. In The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal Jan Marsh does an admirable job attempting to fleece out the verifiable details of Siddal's life, of which there are surprisingly few. However, the book is less a strict biography, and more a study of the way in which biography is influenced by the times. Marsh looks at the renditions of the legend, from Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, to modern scholarship (including her own first forays into Siddal's story). The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal is able to piece together facts about Siddal while illuminating biases that went into earlier biographies (and biographical sketches, since early on Siddal was rarely given much space or attention at all, other than references to her relationship with D.G. Rossetti). It's a bit disappointing to realise that we'll never know much, comparatively, about Siddal, and Marsh is extremely clever to take on that lack of knowledge, and how others filled the spaces, as the basis for her book, rather than attempting another biography filled with guesswork.

This is not to say that there aren't any facts to be had. One does learn a great deal about Elizabeth Siddal, reading The Legend. There aren't many books devoted to Siddal specifically, and even more modern explorations of the PRB, like Desperate Romantics, relegate Siddal to little more than girlfriend/wife. In fact, Siddal studied and produced art in her own right, as well as being muse for Rossetti, and model for Millais' famous Ophelia^† (below). The common idea that Siddal committed suicide is disputed, and her life before "discovery" by Walter Deverell is examined as much as possible. Indeed, any "fact" of Siddal's life (including the spelling of her last name!) has at least two published versions, and Marsh examines all possibilities, keeping in mind the circumstances under which they appear.

The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal is excellent reading not only for those interested in the PRB, or Siddal specifically, but as a very interesting look on how biography —especially biography of women—is created within a societal context^‡. Says Marsh in her Postscript:

The quest for the 'real Elizabeth Siddal' reveals more about the changing ideological context, and the uses to which the legend is put in the redefinitions and negotiations in the realms of gender and art. [...] [B]iography is not reincarnation, but a form of exhumation.

^*My favourite PRB work: Burne-Jones' The Depths of the Sea.
^**I saw a Beata Beatrix in Chicago a couple years ago and almost wept. I suppose this sounds dramatic, but I did get a great lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Art, AMIRITE?
^†The painting of Ophelia, prior to her taking up with Rossetti, gave rise to another often told story about Siddal, who was painted while floating in a bathtub of freezing water, while Millais painted her. "As it was now winter, he placed oil lamps under the tub to warm the water, but was so intent on his work that he allowed them to go out. As a result, Siddal caught a severe cold, and her father later sent Millais a letter demanding £50 for medical expenses. According to Millais' son, he eventually accepted a lower sum"
^‡And now I feel like I need to re-read The Biographer's Tale.

The Little Lady Pt 1: Anne Roiphe

2011-05-10T20:15:00.013-04:00

One of the complaints I've read about Anne Roiphe is that she's written mostly (too many?) memoirs. Since I've not read any of them, Art and Madness was all new territory for me. Like Patti Smith's Just Kids, Art and Madness deftly captures New York at a certain time, for a certain set. Though unlike Smith, Roiphe's cohort is privileged, though no less creative for that. It has been written, as well, that there's some feminist content in Art and Madness, but I don't quite agree. While Roiphe is a known feminist, her actions in this book are anything but. She willfully rejects some of the constraints her society insists she fit into...

It really is true what they said about the fifties. You really were supposed to behave.[...]Don't ever let a boy see menstrual blood. Don't ever let him get to second base. Don't ever admit you need money, love, a lawyer. Don't ever be seen carrying a bottle of liquor.[...]And all of this was to keep life at bay, life like the big waves at the shore, to be rushed into, to be ridden up and down, life that tasted of salt and could pull you out over your head head, that kind of life was to be avoided at all costs and that was just the life I was seeking.

...however, her life is still lived for men, her actions and drive all in service of men. Likely it's her examination of this time that raises her feminist consciousness in later years, but as I say, I haven't read any other works. Art and Madness does note and examine the roadblocks for women, but this is hindsight. Mid-century Roiphe is too young and too excited about breaking free of one set of societal chains to realise she's playing the same script as the middle-class housewives, just in swinging downtown Manhattan instead of a suburb.

He was an artist and she would bear his children and wash his clothes and care for him because there lay her own immortality, there lay her own contribution to the great effort to speak the truth, to shape the words, to write the novel that by existing would justify her human endeavor so clearly in need of justification. I know this because I felt it too, all of it.

In pursuit of this life-less-ordinary, Roiphe begins to haunt City bars, driving in from her safe and secluded college campus. It is at one of these bars, she meets Jack Richardson. Though they must have been intimate, as they produce a daughter, Roiphe writes more of her loneliness, and her sacrifice in dedication to his art. She pays for his booze, she drives him home, she takes him to Europe so he can work, and in a move that my 19-year-old self understands, falls in love and marries him, without any acknowledgment (physical or otherwise) that he cares for her. All this in service of his art.

The now-famous scene in Art and Madness is no less shocking and sad for being quoted and talked about. Roiphe is carrying a typewriter home for Jack, and she goes into labour, in the middle of a blizzard which makes transit impossible, and taxis scarce.

Suddenly I feel a wetness down my leg. The water has broken. I need to go to the hospital. I rest the typewriter on a car fender and consider what to do. I struggle on. I make it several blocks. I stop at a pay phone. Jack is sleeping and he doesn't wake up. I walk on to the hospital. It's another twenty blocks. I will not leave the typewrite behind. I am afraid I will give birth in the snow. I do not. From the hospital pay phone, I call my mother

What one is left with, is that Roiphe is desperately lonely. At a time when she's expected to "behave," her soul simply can't conform. Because she is not allowed, for myriad reasons, to acknowledge the artist she wants to be (and it's interesting that she makes note of what she's reading at each point in the book), she is willing to spend her money (rather, her parents' money), her time, her youth, and her life, hitching herself to a man that is attractive mostly for his writerly potential. She's in love with the art, not the man. This is "madness": she does not yet know the option exists to be the artist herself.

Full confession: I did not read the foreword by Katie Roiphe, because Katie Roiphe is an asshole.

A Change of Scenery

2011-04-18T20:53:00.013-04:00

"Rachel, I work in a psychiatrist's office. I see people all day, in and out of their conditions. Who they are at any given time is usually based on whether they're sticking to their meds."

- Douglas Coupland, Player One

In a Strange Room is ostensibly a novel. The book's "three journeys" all centre around one character, moving through time and place. (Like his countryman, J.M. Coeteze, Damon Galgut has chosen to name the protagonist after himself. How much of himself is really in these stories, of course, is impossible for the reader to say.) However, each journey stands easily on its own, and does not reference or require the others to frame it. Each piece meets the arguments in Rebecca Rosenblum's post "What is a short story?" and I'm inclined to treat them as such.

Travel is an interesting way of knowing people. The people you meet while away would react to you differently if you knew them day-to-day. Those you think you know well will act in new ways when on unfamiliar ground. When you travel to someone else's home, you will find that person's environment has a large effect on their behaviour. Galgut examines these three relationship possibilities.

In the first journey, he meets a German man while they are both on vacation in Greece. Their approach on a road, foretells an acquaintance that seems full of possibility. They write to each other when each returns home, and Damon feels the frisson of expectation with every letter. Finally, Reiner comes to South Africa. Anyone who has been in a long-distance longing can guess how this turns out.

Damon meets Jerome while wandering in Zimbabwe. On vacation from Switzerland, Jerome intrigues Damon. What follows is a mad chase; Jerome's itinerary is planned, and Damon must scramble to keep up the pursuit. When Jerome has to return home, he extracts a promise that Damon will come to Switzerland to visit. When he arrives, Jerome is rarely at home, and Damon spends more time with his mother. Upon arrival, Damon is an afterthought to Jerome.

Finally, Damon agrees to take a good friend's girlfriend to Goa. Anna is diagnosed bi-polar, and it's thought that time away will do her good. However, Anna proves a difficult and duplicitous traveling companion. Through their trip, Damon must find out how far he is willing to go to help save someone he barely knows.

The common theme through the journeys, is context. Each time, Damon has to revise his concept of the relationship when the geography changes. "Personality" is infinitely mutable, and when the scene changes, people will change with it, inevitably. Further, changes in the personality of his those he meets and travels with is so changeable it has a serious effect on his own identity. In In a Strange Room the narration changes from third to first person, and back, with no discernible pattern, calling into question even the concept of the Self.

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. the roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiper off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weight and permanent, has completely gone. Thing happen once only, and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize.

Nobody Reads Clarice Lispector

2011-03-30T22:00:00.016-04:00

I came across Clarice Lispector on the Writers No One Reads tumblr. The expression on her face in that photo is probably what captured me; fierce and arrogant^*. It's a face that says:

Someone read my stories and said that that wasn't literature, it was trash. I agree. But there's a time for everything. There's also a time for trash

I randomly chose a title from the TPL catalogue, and away we went with Soulstorm.

This collection really does sweep through like a violent weather event. Lispector says in her introduction that the stories in Soulstorm were written on commission, something she was not used to doing. Invigorated by the challenge, she wrote most of the stories in the span of a few days, and the collection bears the mark of her fervor; one feels pushed forward by the momentum.

The pieces in Soulstorm are quite short, for the most part, and swing between erotically-charged fantastic realism and (what I assume are) Lispector's true-to-life ruminations and re-telling of anecdotes. There's little cohesion between the two, but what's interesting, in reading Soulstorm, is a sense that one is watching the manic progress of a creative endeavor. It's as if Lispector must stop and give herself a break from the darkly speculative fictions she creates with slower—but equally distressing— observations of the world.

The first story is of a woman who decides to become a prostitute after losing her virginity to a spirit called Ixtlan. Some pages later, Lispector includes a brief anecdote, told as if she was sitting at coffee, about a woman jilted by her fiance. Of the tale, she writes:

The realism here is invented. I beg your pardon, for besides recounting the facts I also guess, and what I guess I write down. I guess at reality. but this story isn't my baby.

It's a very strange book, Soulstorm.

The most interesting piece is "Where You Were at Night," which very neatly brings together the two sides of Soulstorm:the fantastic and the ordinary. Initially, "Where You Were at Night" seems to be an interpretation of a lawless and erotically-carnivorous Sadean society^**. Initially I felt this story went too far, taking the earlier fantastical themes to an overly strange place, since most of the book kept at least one foot in the Real. It's the longest story in the collection, and the descriptions of the rather grotesque Bacchanal, presided over by the androgynous god Xanthippe, seem to go on forever. Then, "[d]awn: the egg came whirling slowly from the horizon into space. It was morning[.]" We are returned to the world as we know it. Each actor in the "dream" is accounted for, and placed neatly back into their daily routine, most without memory of the nightmare acts. Nearly the same amount of space is dedicated to the mundanity of everyday life as was given to the overnight activities. I'm not sure why this affected me so much, but it's the piece that has stuck with me, weeks later. She ends the story with:

All that I have written here is true—it exists. There exists a universal mind that has guided me. Where were you at night? No one knows. Don't try to answer—for the love of God. I don't want to know your answer.

I still don't know what to make of this odd collection. It feels more like watching a process at work, than a work itself. I know that I'm going to have to read more of Clarice Lispector to get some sort of grip on how she "normally" writes, in order to put this work in context. By her own admission it was created in unusual circumstances, so I'm definitely interested to see how that affected her writing, if at all.

^*Incidentally, I have a similar story about Anne Sexton and this photo.
^**I was reminded quite a lot of the character Jude Mason's book in A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower

Better Living Through Short Fiction

2011-03-28T19:28:00.011-04:00

Since it's The Year of the Short Story I'm going to try and give more attention to the collections I read. I haven't been all that receptive to short stories in the past, mostly because I liked the commitment of novels. Lately, though, I've begun to appreciate the incredible craft that goes into short stories. Getting everything—narrative, character development, setting, action, resolution—into 20 pages seems an intensely different exercise from doing it in 300 (and neither of those things I have any skill at, so both get massive respect from me). So thanks, YoSS; I'm on board.

Zsuszi Gartner's collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, relates a world just slightly different from the one we inhabit now. It's not simply slightly futuristic; there's also a bit more magic and a bit more menace in Gartner's Vancouver. That the setting is so recognizable, yet constantly just a little off, gives an unheimlich tension to the stories in the collection. It feels as if there's always something ready to explode, or horrify, just around the corner. In "The Adopted Chinese Daughter's Rebellion" we visit a wealthy cul-de-sac (one of several in the collection) where adopted Chinese daughters are the status quo status-symbol. The families are hyper-culturally aware, denying the daughters any Western influence. The reader can recognize a less hyperbolic version of this (wealthy, white families adopting from poorer countries), yet Garter pushes the current trend further, to its ultimate surprising and horrifying detail.

Much was made of the cunning little embroidered boots the girls would wear, even to bed. Some of it was a bit too technical for us, with computer-generated diagrams detailing the length of cotton (4.57 metres) that would tightly bind the feet, the degree the four smaller toes were to be bent towards the sole (180), thereby breaking them, and how similar the bound foot is to a lotus blossom (very).

The excessive upper-middle class is often at literal war with the working classes throughout the stories of Better Living. A basement-apartment dweller, doing her community service in a mascot outfit, kidnaps a young boy. She's pushed into action by his outward signs of wealth (he's wearing a private school uniform), and how his parents trigger her resentment of the "Dan and Patricia"s of the world—the model perfect family seen in advertisements. In other stories the houses of the rich fall from their cliffside perches into dust. Husbands who provide "lamb popsicles in fenugreek sauce" and "ampoules filled with wild-morel cream" are emasculated by a beer-from-the-can car-on-blocks hoser type, who leaves all the wives pregnant in his wake. Alex, a woman who is hitting menopause too early and too quickly (while her husband becomes ever more childlike),

overheard a couple in JJ Bean loudly debating the pros and cons of a $25,000 residential wind turbine or a bicycle powered generator. The woman seemed particularly concerned about not losing access to Netflix. "If you want to get off the grid," she found herself saying, as if offering advice on the daily blend, "try sub-Saharan Africa." The woman called her an earth-raping, racist, Trotskyite bitch.

The upper and upper-middle classes are, in Gartner's hands, almost always caricatures, undone by their own greed, hypocrisy, and privilege-induced silliness.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is one of those lucky collections that works extremely well as a whole. Stories in collection don't have to be related, but (for me) it's nice when there's a thematic thread. All the stories in Better Living work well together; they all exist in the same (or similar) invented world, and maintain a solid and identifiable point-of-view throughout. And it's nice, as a downtown Toronto elite, to hear a West Coast voice, now and then.

Reviewed from advanced reading copy. Release date April 5, 2011

Catfight

2011-03-24T19:40:00.013-04:00

Kelly Valen was compelled to write Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships after she published a New York Times article about the extremely poor treatment she received from her sorority sisters after she had been date-raped in college. The reaction to that article (much of it critical of Valen herself), and the communication she received afterwards, made her want to investigate dysfunctional relationships further.

Intentionally or not, I'd found myself scratching the surface of something significant. The notion that women of all ages and backgrounds were writing to me not so much about the date rape or the Greek system but to share their own hidden hurts and discomfort with other females really floored me

     She was also surprised at how many people asked her to look more deeply into the patriarchal causes of girl-on-girl hate. In Twisted Sisterhood she prefers to put these concerns aside, stating that she's out of her depth looking into feminist theory too deeply. In fact, the book ultimately suffers from this attitude, as Valen is unwilling to look into much of anything too deeply, beginning too many thoughts with "Well, I'm not saying x but maybe y?" As if she's afraid to offend, again. Instead, she spends most of the text quoting from her over 3000 survey respondents, but refuses to come to any conclusions, or even put forth any theories, other than "women must just be different somehow."

     I'm not sure what I was hoping to get out of Twisted Sisterhood. Perhaps some insight into my own actions: I too fear friendship with women due to past hurts, yet unlike most I instantly open up and share too much, too fast. I also become annoyed pretty easily, and I'm not shy about kvetching. Twisted Sisterhood made me feel ashamed of the latter, but didn't even try to give me strategies or alternatives. Instead, Valen tosses around a lot of nebulous ideas and buzzwords like "personal responsibility" and "co-operation" without really engaging with any of the negativity that the book is essentially about.
     Never once does Valen acknowledge that it's okay to be pissed off when people are shitty. Regardless of gender, I feel that I have every right to talk about being hurt or pissed off when people are shitty. It's not a "girl thing" it's a people thing. I shouldn't have to take shitty behaviour from anyone, man or woman. What Twisted Sisterhood had a real opportunity to do, and failed to address completely, is put forth better and more constructive ways to deal with these situations.

     Here's my own personal theory on mean girls, and I certainly don't expect you to agree. In fact, I'm not even sure how valid it is, but it's honestly the best thing I've been able to come up with. (Other ideas are, of course, what the comment section is for. Have at it!)
     Yes, women are worse to each other than men are to other men. At some point^* we had to compete with other women, and other women only, for resources. Those resources being men. Without a man the world was a dangerous and unfairly difficult place for a woman. Valen is correct when she relates that women now feel that they're not competing for anything; for the most part, women are just competing. However, to me this seems like a hangover from the bad old days, which didn't end that long ago.
     My cohort's mothers would definitely have learned it from their mothers. Our grandmothers might have had the vote, but didn't have many opportunities outside the home. Even those of us lucky enough to have grown up in a more feminist household still encountered the larger majority of kids who didn't, and who learned those lessons of female competition from their mothers. And so on down. I think, I hope, that this might lessen through successive generations, as we women realise that the behavior we've learned isn't getting us anywhere, and is an antiquated reaction to conditions that, for the most part, don't exist anymore.^**
     We've lost what we were fighting for and now we just fight. This can be especially evident at work, as it is a place where there is tangible reward for "winning." Valen does report that in her survey, many woman did not like working for a female boss, or that they feel a lot of tension in the workplace between females. Though, it's possible too, that women have to work harder, and overcompensate in being seen as less emotional and tougher than the men (think the Anna Wintour boogeyman), if they are to be taken seriously enough to rise to executive levels. (Depends on the workplace of course, but ask your nearest female CEO about her experience. Oh, never mind. Maybe there's a VP handy?)
     There's still a patriarchal element at work of course. Valen is also correct when she says that many women lash out because they are insecure in themselves (our Moms were right about that). Insecurity is also very, very good for business. Valen knows that "we can, to some extent, be counted on to [...]compete, compete, compete" which serves to "drive our purchasing decisions." Again, she lays this at the feet of women, who "notice, evaluate, and one-up each other" without examining where this behaviour might come from. Since men are still over-represented in owners and executive branches across these — and most — businesses and corporations, when we buy to improve our self-esteem, we make those men richer. My feeling is that it's not a direct "How can we screw women over?" ploy, but women feeling bad about themselves is a well-known revenue stream, one I'm sure corporations won't be giving up any time soon. And given how ingrained the current capitalist method is, I don't think this would change if women were in charge. Women CEOs will be just as responsible for the bottom line as male ones. Again, cultural hangover.

     The overriding message in Twisted Sisterhood is that women are ultimately responsible for the way they treat each other. While I think on an individual level this is true, and that as individuals we have a responsibility to think and do better, there's more at play on a societal level. Women are not mean just because they're women. Something has made us so, and it would be helpful if we had more insight into what that is; fighting an invisible and unacknowledged opponent will only be an exercise in futility.
     Valen's thesis, if there can be said to be one, can be drawn from a quote in the last chapter, called "Betting on the Power of Females and 'Sisterhood'." She quotes a man^† who says "Women are mean to each other because they're slaves to their overblown insecurities. It's in your nature and it's your greatest weakness." (Emphasis mine.) Valen sees nothing wrong with this analysis, that women are simply weak and insecure, not bothering to question who benefits from this condition (which I absolutely refuse to believe is innate). "This kind of in-your-face diagnosis of our female culture might rub you the wrong way," she says, "but it's hard to disagree with this fellow, really." Maybe it's hard for Valen to disagree, but that's in keeping with her inability to show any strength at all, even in a chapter with "Power of Females" in the title. If women follow Valen's trend of shying away from firm opinion and action out of fear of causing offense, then we will continue to be weak and insecure. The answer to female aggression is not knee-jerk passivity.

^*I admit this point in time is pretty tough to pin down: when did we lose property rights, if we ever had them? When did we become chattel, if we ever weren't? When did we become regarded more for our bodies than brains?
^**Though our rights are still under backlash-y attack. Not to mention those places in which women are still second-class citizens.
†This is extremely frustrating, because while Valen refuses to place any blame on the way women have been treated at the hands of men, she is, in the end, really concerned with how "our brothers, husbands, bosses[!], and fathers of girls are feeling about the females in their lives."

And I Feel Fine

2011-02-15T11:15:00.007-05:00

There's no way Nicolas Dickner's follow up to the breathtaking Nikolski was going to be as well received. Get cliché, call it a (critic-induced) "sophomore slump." To Dickner's credit, I don't think he even tried to get near that achievement. Instead, he wrote a "novel [that] almost seems intended for teenaged readers." I agree, emphatically. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Apocalypse for Beginners works extremely well as a YA book, and maybe should have been published as such. This isn't to say that Apocalypse is lacking content that would interest adult readers, or that its language is too simplistic; that would be a disservice to both Dickner and YA as a genre. Excepting the Gossip Girls and the Twilights (and there is just as much speedy garbage on the adult shelves), good YA fiction is just as deep and thoughtful as some of the adult novels out there, dealing with topics like sexual assault, eating disorders, sex and sexual identity, drugs, religon... all the biggies that cause angst in both teenagers and adults.

Dickner's heroine, Hope, is dealing with the inevitable approach of a hereditary mental illness, that causes her and her family to think much more about the End of the World than others might. She carries the burden of being the caretaker for her mother, who has been broken by this illness. Her companion for most of the novel, and the book's narrator, is a thoughtful young man named Randall. Randall is living in a world in flux: from geopolitical events (and the new ways in which people have access to information on those events) to the changing model of business (from family run to corporate owned) he is affected rather deeply by events he can barely fathom, let alone exert any power over. While Hope's family has a condition that causes them to pick a date for a literal apocalypse, Randall and other "normal" kids like him are seeing a massive shift in their world, as the Cold War -- and the easy binaries it enabled -- ends (and in contrast, making a real apocalypse less possible). To say that I think Apocalypse for Beginners was misfiled as an "adult novel" is not an insult in the slightest. I think that given the size of the book (less than 300 quickly read pages), the age of the characters in it, and a romantic "relationship more chaste than anything this side of Hogwarts" the novel is pretty solidly positioned in YA territory.

That "chaste" comment above is from the Whitlock review again, and I gotta say, this seems a strange sort of criticism to me. Are teenagers allowed to do things other than give into their hormones? Does it have to be Cruel Intentions to be believable? I exaggerate, but take my point. I don't see anything wrong in not fucking, as long as that's not held up as some kind of moral thing, as in the Twilight books. Randall just seems to 1) be shy about things and 2) care about Hope -- and understand her overly-complicated life -- enough to know that any attempt to add a sexual relationship to the mix would cause her more harm than good. Again, he's a thoughtful, nice boy. They exist, even in high-school. This lack of overt sexual action does also position the book back into YA territory, which certainly doesn't shy away from sex in all cases, but is often able put sex aside for the sake of the story, and whatever central issues it contains.

The reviews have been mostly middling, but I think fans of Dickner (and his excellent translator Lazer Lederhendler, who knows just which French bits should remain in order to keep the reader placed solidly in Quebec) will enjoy Apocalypse for Beginners. It's not Nikolski, it can't be Nikolski. It's a smaller, quieter book; less great, perhaps, but not less worthwhile.

35 years, 33 days

2011-02-07T09:25:00.003-05:00

I am alive at night.
I am dead in the morning,
an old vessel who used up her oil,
bleak and pale boned.
No miracle. No Dazzle.
-Anne Sexton, "Moon Song, Woman Song"

I followed a Twitter link, the other day, to an article that said "the age of 35.09—or approximately 33 days past your 35th birthday—is the precise tipping point," the point at which a woman's looks inevitably, irrevocably, go downhill. The study, such as it was, was paid for by a skin cream company, natch. It still hit me hard. I just turned 35 in December. My D-day had been January 25^th. It was all downhill from there. I updated Facebook with the link, and commented "Nothing left to do but die." This birthday has been dragging me down. What was the point in all that exercise and healthy eating and not having baby weight if my visage is just going to get hag-like anyway? Nice legs, shame about your face.

I have "marionette lines," that look to me as if someone carved them in with an Exacto knife. It's the years of smoking, taking their toll. Everything a 20-year-old does, they do with supposed impunity, without any real knowledge of the fact that aging comes for all of us. I remember, so well, feeling invincible.

As a kid I was taunted for my looks, for being ugly, acne-covered, and fat. I internalised all of that. I did my time in the Disordered Eating Dungeon. I never felt thin enough, though I relied on being thin, because I always felt so ugly. Last year, at 34, I discovered running, and the for the first time I felt real peace with my body, and consequently with my face. Photos were taken of me that year that I liked, not just tolerated. When I looked in the mirror I consistently enjoyed what I saw. For once, for a year, I felt good about myself. If this was aging, I was all for it. Then came the lines. And the 35^th birthday. So much for all that.

Maybe it would behoove me to read I Feel Bad About My Neck. See how the older half lives. I have beautiful friends in their 20s. They're dewy and gorgeous. One of them expressed surprise at my feelings on aging. She asked, doesn't one become more confident? I replied that you have to be confident, to compensate for looking old. I hate being the voice of sadness, but I can't help expressing how this feels. How surprised I am that I look in the mirror and see what is just the beginning. The decline. I am not comfortable in my skin, as I was for that one gorgeous year.

Thanks, Susan, but knowing it doesn't stop it from kicking the shit out of me. Because it really is. Sontag even acknowledges the dreaded number by name: "After thirty-five any mention of one’s age carries with it the reminder that one is probably closer to the end of one’s life than the beginning." People laud celebrities for looking amazing at 40 and 50, but of course they have the money and time to spend on looking perpetually 30 -- maximum. "Most of the women who successfully delay the appearance of age are rich, with unlimited leisure to devote to nurturing along nature’s gifts. Often they are actresses. (That is, highly paid professionals at doing what all women are taught to practice as amateurs.)"

"But although this system of inequality is operated by men, it could not work if women themselves did not acquiesce in it. Women reinforce it powerfully with their complacency, with their anguish, with their lies." But what's a girl to do? Even a girl that recognizes all the binaries and bullshit. I've read The Beauty Myth. To not buy into the anti-aging industry

is the real social threat: that women will first accept their aging, then admire it, and finally enjoy it. Wasting women's money is the calculable damage; but the damage this fraud does women through its legacy of the dread of aging is incalculable. (Wolf 113)

It's capitalism. It's a patriarchal set up; a possible excuse for the males who leave us for new models when we lose our fecundity -- if you believe the biological determinists. And yet: what's a girl to do, when she is no longer a girl (despite the embarrassingly erroneous suffix on her email address), and the world does not come easily knocking at her door, what can she do but anguish? Fuck me, I want a cigarette.

Simone Weil wrote something that speaks beautifully and simply to me: "To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death." When I was 34, I tattoo'd Klimt's conception of Death on my arm, from shoulder to elbow. When my tattoo artist placed the stencil on my arm, he remarked on Death's gaze: "He's got your back." It's not dying I'm frightened of; I accept death as truth. For me, the fear is what's expressed by Alex in The Witches of Eastwick^*: "Getting old. That scares me. I mean, it's a short life, isn't it? [...] I look in the mirror sometimes and I see everything falling apart. Fast." Live or die, but don't poison everything...^**

Sontag's article was written when I was three. When I was eight, Susan Brownmiller's^† Femininity was published. In it, Brownmiller noted that we live

[...]in a culture where the chief criteria of feminine success are ephemeral youth and beauty, a woman's sense of failure is likely to begin at the moment she is percieved by others as no longer young and desirable. (165-66)

The Beauty Myth came out when I was 15. And here we still are, when I'm 35. The terrors of aging have made women react with horrors of their own, long before I was born. Lady Bathory's legend is of bathing in the blood of virgins to maintain her youth, and today Joan Rivers has, though surgery, bought herself an inhuman mask. In the morning, when I see a face I don't want, I understand all of it.

^*From the screenplay, found here. I don't know if this actually appears in the book.
^**Anne Sexton, "Live"
^†In one of the alternate universes in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, breasts are called "Brownmillers." Oh tee hee, Wilson.

The School Visit

2011-01-28T09:07:00.007-05:00

I have lingering flu weird head space. So forgive some wandering in this post. I've been living on Green Juice for days.

When I was in the 10^th grade we had a Real! Live! Author! come give a talk to the budding writers among us. It was totally optional to go, and there were probably about 20 students collected in the library to hear her talk. I'd just handed in a short story that had received an unusually high mark (and I've probably not written any fiction as good since), and was told that I should go as well. So there I was.

The author was Elona Malterre. You might not have heard of her. Certainly the other students hadn't. But by some weird twist, I had. My Dad had bought and read her book, The Celts^*. Since I was constantly raiding my Dad's library, I'd read it too. This was my encounter with a Real! Live! Author!, and I still remember thinking "Well if I'd have known it was her, I'd have brought the book for her to sign!" I was actually pretty thrilled to meet someone whose work I'd read. I'm still that way, and I'm totally in awe that people I call friends are Real! Live! Authors! It seems like a sort of magic to me, to be able to create a whole book.

Since this was 20 years ago, I don't remember terribly much. However, Malterre said one thing that has always stuck with me. She told us that every book has a time in your life. Even if you start a book and can't finish it, set it aside and pick it up again next year. Or the year after. As you grow and change, your perspective will be different, and that book will mean something new. She told us never to force yourself to finish a book, just wait until the time is right for you and that book. This was powerful advice. There have been a few books in my life (some Great Literature, some not) that haven't thrilled me on first, second, or third try, but when the time was right, I'd tear through them. The best example from my own life is The Crystal Cave, which I tried to read about five times between the 7^th grade and University. Maybe it was all the Arthurian revival stuff I was reading in my Victorian poetry class, but things finally clicked, I spent a thrilling couple days with the book in 1996.

Sadly, I don't read like I used to. I finish almost^** every book I start, owing mostly to my extensive use of the Toronto Public Library system, and the books don't have time to match my mood, or life path, or whatever. It no longer happens that I have no next-book scheduled and instead must peruse my shelves (or box of mass markets) for that book I didn't finish, but wouldn't give away (and there are still of few of those sitting there, so sadly neglected). I keep buying, too, and that pile just grows and grows. I still value what Elona Malterre said, though. It's great advice. I pass it on to others, when I can.

This post was sparked by an author who also does school visits, Jill Murray, and her post today on Bookmadam about how authors pay the bills. I don't know how common school visits are; I only ever remember having that one (my distant foggy elementary school past thinks we might have had one there too, but it was Calgary, and we didn't have a lot of local published talent). I think it's a great idea though, and something that really benefits the kids who get to participate. I didn't realise it was something authors did to supplement their income, but people need to be paid for their time, and to my mind, it's money well spent.

^*I don't know where he came across it, and if it was just some freaky coincidence that she happened to be a local author. He and I both did most of our book shopping, at the time, in used bookstores, so the mass market paperback copy we had probably came from there. Sorry, Elona!
^**Picoult is just really that bad.

One Day

2011-01-24T09:35:00.003-05:00

My taste in most things seems to run to Brits. Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Radiohead. Quality Street, Sherbet, Jellybabies. A.S. Byatt, Thomas Hardy, Angela Carter. So One Day was an easy sell for me. It's a rock-'n'-roll candy-bag of a book, with an essential easy Englishness. While One Day deals with some more serious topics (death, divorce, alcoholism, life paths), it feels like reading Bridget Jones's Diary. This is a complementary comparison; One Day is filled with likeable, relateable characters, who are often very funny. These are people I'd have over for dinner, and Drunken Yelling^TM.

Spoiler-y things happen after here!

One Day's narrative trick is to relate the events of July 15^th, starting in 1988. This is the day we find Emma and Dexter in bed, though not post-coitus. We are led through the next 20-odd years of their life, through the ups and downs of a vibrant and wonderful friendship, reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally. In fact, Emma's later boyfriend, Ian, actually alludes to that film, though derisively. I found myself tearing through the first 3/4^ths of the book, just enjoying the ride. Unfortunately, no one can ever just let men and women be friends, and the thing I dreaded most happened: Emma and Dexter get together. Moreover, they get married. Emma, to this point, had been rather unconventional, with a wandering career path and a "not-for-me" attitude towards marriage and children. In fact, she resents the intrusion of children into the lives of all her friends. When she marries Dexter, however, she comes to realise she does want a child. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a show of maturity for Emma, or an easy narrative out. Either way, seeing Emma become those things she fought against being was a let down. And then, Emma dies.

By this part of the book, I'd checked out a bit. I just didn't like them together any more. Maybe Nicholls didn't either, and had to kill Emma off to make things interesting. Emma dies suddenly, riding her bike in the rain, struck by a car. The passage itself is supposed to be startling:

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever

I was reminded of another startling death scene I read a couple years ago, from a breakout French bestseller (this is probably spoiler-y too, but I'm trying not to be). Same sort of premise: quick death, struck by car. Yet that time, I wept from it. I didn't see it coming, and I cared so much, that I was brought to tears^*. When Emma died, I thought "Oh, that was easy."

One Day remains an excellent read, though I resented the conventionality it stumbles into near the end, and the odd way Nicholl's tries to make up for it. One Day was yet another Lainey Liu recommendation (she's a hell of a reviewer and reader, whatever you think about the celebrity gossip biz), and I wouldn't say the less-than-great ending quarter of One Day would make me trust her taste in books any less. She nailed Room, and got me to read Furious Love, so I'll keep heeding her suggestions.

^*I almost never cry at movies, but Hardy (for example) can make me bawl for days. I'm more invested in the word, I suppose

This Again (In Defence of the Humble Worker)

2011-01-19T09:04:00.007-05:00

So often on book blogs, and book news sites, I see people complain about the chain bookstore employee. About how dull and stupid they are, what a crime it is they can't spell "Ondaatje," how tragic that the bookstore employee encountered can't read minds/hasn't read what you're looking for/doesn't know your favourite author. Whenever I see it, I'm not shy about yelling at the author of such comments.

During a morning meeting at Chapters, near the beginning of my time there, one of my managers said "Even if you read a book a week, that's only 52 books a year. Look around you. There's no possible way you will ever read even a tiny percentage of the books here in your lifetime. So when customers are frustrated that you don't know exactly which book they're vaguely talking about — and they will be — it's not your fault." We'd do the best we could to help customers. Most times we didn't have to work too hard to get it right; people are generally looking for popular books and showing them the best-seller shelf usually did the trick.

Chain or not, bookstore employees are usually readers. Maybe we weren't all chomping down on Dostoevsky, but we read. A lot of folks I worked with had post-secondary degrees (as do I), of the sort that don't have real practical applications. Yet there's an inherent classism that happens when some people enter a chain bookstore. The retail grunts can't possibly be human, right? "They don't really care about books, I mean, look at all these candles... oooooh lavendar!"^* Fact is, your local Chapters/Indigo employee is probably pretty passionate about books, and reading. Sure, there's the odd person who's doing it solely for the paycheque (and that's totally fair too), but for readers who work retail, there's no better place to do it.

I worked at the Chapters location mentioned in the recent Eye Weekly article "In defence of Chapters." Unfortunatley, the piece does suffer from the same prejudice I mention above. Sarah Nicole Prickett writes "They make no suggestions, having nothing to prove; they work at Chapters." The implicit message is that they couldn't possibly care about literature, they work in a big box. She goes on to say that while spending time at Chapters "[t]he only risk is running into someone with a normal job, like in corporate PR or helping children[.]" Because, you know, people who work retail aren't really "normal" or "people" or any of that. Maybe I'm taking this a bit on the chin, but Prickett isn't defending anything here, other than her need to go to Chapters and casually rip up magazines (and actually, yes, they do mind when you do that, that's called "loss" and stores don't like it).

Given all this, it was nice to see that chain bookstores really can mean something. When the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Sqaure closed, the employees left a heartfelt note in the window. Patrons, who had come to treasure this big store, and the people it employed, wrote back.

Click for larger version

^*The number of people who would complain to frontline employees about the selection of non-book items in Chapters/Indigo was pretty hilarious. You think those folks have anything to do with the decision making? Or that they have a direct line to Reisman/Silver (is Silver still around)? Please. Fact is, the margins are better on that stuff, and it's what keeps the stores in business.

When She Takes a Walk

2011-01-17T09:49:00.007-05:00

Missing woman dies after exposed to extreme cold.

My Mom hadn't been working for a while. Before we'd admit anything to ourselves she'd been let go from her job, unable to learn new computer systems. So she'd been spending her days indoors, wandering from room to room, wiping down counters and dusting bookshelves. Every day she'd clean the catbox then walk to the end of our street where there was a "poop and scoop" deposit bin for the surrounding off-leash park. The walk was a good idea; it got her out of the house every day, into the fresh air.

When her diagnosis finally came I went home as soon as I could. I arrived on Boxing Day. It was a relief to my Dad to have someone in the house. He'd been leaving her alone, going to work. He couldn't afford not to. Still can't. On returning he'd often find the oven or the taps on. It's what we expected to happen, eventually. So having me there was one whole week without the stress. I would turn off the taps and the stove, if needed. I'd make her eat. And every day she went for that walk.

I joke that cold weather follows me: when I moved to Toronto at the end of February the temperature suddenly dropped; I went to LA this Christmas and was met with rain and 10 degree temperatures; that December, leading into January, Calgary denied me a Chinook, and instead greeted me with snow and minus 30. Still, every day my Mom bundled up, walked a little over five minutes each way, and deposited the catbox refuse. One morning, half-asleep in the basement bedroom, I heard the back doorbell ring. Initially I ignored it. It wasn't my house anymore, the caller wouldn't be there to see me. The doorbell kept ringing. Then I realised my mother had gone for her walk. It was my mother at the door, outside, in minus 30 degree weather. I raced up the stairs to let her in.

She'd lost her keys somewhere along the way. She insisted we go back out and look for them, in the howling wind, on every lawn, in any disturbed snowbank. We never did find her keys. I was completely shaken. This event, more than the diagnosis, made her disease real to me.

It was minus 30 and 9am. My Dad wouldn't return home until 4. This morning, when I heard the story of the woman who died, all I could think of was that cold day my Mom locked herself out.

I told her that she had to suspend these walks, at least for the winter, trying somehow to reconcile the fact that this was both my mother and a person I had to make rules for. Sounding like a mother myself, I said "You could have frozen to death out there!" I was so thankful she'd remembered, somehow, that I was there. She had enough in her to ring that doorbell. Though maybe she'd have rung it anyway, all day, waiting. It hurts to think about.

I didn't show my Mom how upset I was. I tried to be calm, but I was so young, and so unprepared for this to happen. That was a real taste of the times we'd have moving forward. All the changes for her life.

I read Tangles on Christmas day this year. It was painful to read, and after the bit about how Sarah Leavitt's Mom got lost the first time, I had to put the book down because I was crying too hard to see.

Before my visit I asked Mom if she would let me videotape her talking about having Alzheimer’s. She though that would be a good idea[…] She said she had made some notes about the day she got lost. This is that story without all the pauses:
"I knew I had to walk down Smythe Street to our house. Part way down, I got lost. I mean, I could see where I had to go, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. It seemed so far away. I ended up outside Harvey’s, where you used to go, remember? So I went inside. A nice young man […] called me a cab and I told the driver what happened. 'I got lost because I have Alzheimer’s.' 'Alzheimer’s . Phew. That’s rough. My Dad had it, used to go out to the bar in the middle of the night.' People here are so kind. They really care. I’m so lucky.
[…]
This is my new bracelet. It’s from the police in case I get lost. But I’ll never go out again by myself.

After my Mom lost her keys that day, my Dad didn't replace them. He'd just lock the back door when he left, and hoped she didn't decide to go out the front door (which has a knob deadbolt, not one you'd need a key for). I don't know why it didn't occur to either of us just to change the lock. None of us were in our right minds. Thankfully, using the front door was something my family never did, and she'd never got the habit of leaving that way. At that stage, she was relying a lot on rote. Later that year, in the summer, she did leave by the front door once, and wound up deep into a different suburban neighbourhood. From what my Dad told me, a nice older lady -- older, for my mother wasn't even 60 yet -- managed to get my Mom talking enough to piece together where she lived, and got her home. They waited there for my Dad to get home from work. Mom got the bracelet then, though Dad also changed the locks. She never needed to use the bracelet; she would never go anywhere unattended for the rest of her life.

The Wayback Machine

2011-01-05T20:40:00.005-05:00

There's a lot of talk right now about the edited Huckleberry Finn.

I just keep thinking about this Family Ties^* episode.

^*Man, I totally forgot how didactic 80s sitcoms can be. "Aren't we the most perfect rich, white liberal family ever? Peachy!! Learn our ways!"

2010 Year End List Thing Blah Blah

2011-01-02T13:55:00.006-05:00

I thought I might squeak one more book into the count this year, but I've actually read NOTHING over the past week, while on vacation in Los Angeles. Weird state of affairs that. Anyway, here's the 2010 Book Count.

I should have done this yesterday, but I spent the day convalescing, watching 30 Rock, and hoping the gin in my system would wear through eventually. Here are my no-particular-number-of 2010 standouts (and hopefully my from-memory details are right; I'm still partially made of gin):
The Glass Room - Should have won the Booker. My favourite of the 2009 field.
The Women's Room - When the Women's Movement was newish, finding its feet, and really, really active. This is some sort of Golden Age that I'm too young to remember.
Ten Storey Love Song - An entire novel in a single sentence, that starts on the front cover. Sounds gimmicky, but isn't. Bit of a Trainspotting vibe, but everything Brit+Drugs has that by default I suppose. (Linked review by Irvine Welsh doesn't help either, heh.) Even the Dogs is also a Brit+Drugs book, which is lesser only in that it isn't as daring.
Fauna - As much of a love song to Toronto as anything else. Reminded me why I live here (there, heh, I'm not in T.O. right now).
Gate at the Stairs - Rightfully in a lot of "Year's Best" lists. Deals with Big Issues (race, class, 9-11, becoming an adult) on an extremely personal level.
I Love Dick - I discovered Chris Kraus this year, rhapsodized about her, and haven't been the same since.
Fear of Fighting - Read in three hours, hurtling through breakups and mental illness, sadness and hopefull steps towards redemption.
Player One - Not because it's anywhere near his best work, but my copy is signed, and that's a definite highlight in my year.
Room - Truly amazing. A lot of people are put off by the 5-yr-old narrator, for various reasons, but the linked review by Lainey Lui (a noted gossip blogger) really, really nails why it worked for me.
Tangles - I cried my way through Tangles. I went through a lot of this with my Mom, who is still alive in a nursing home, but as gone from us as a living person can be. It was very, very difficult to read, but I'm glad I did. Yes, it upset me, but it also showed me that the absolute horror of this disease isn't something we do alone. There are others like us.

Feminized Literature, Motherhood, & Canada Reads

2010-11-27T12:15:00.011-05:00

It was with trepidation I opened the current CNQ, dubbed "The Gender Issue." I understand, and advocate, the need to be fair to all sides when delving into any issue, but today, this week, I'm tired of being angry. And if you're going to give equal time to all ideas on gender (specifically, gender and Canadian literature), I'm going to get angry at something. It's inevitable. I'm an "angry feminist" and generally pretty happy about that.

So I was gratified that the lead piece was Nicole Dixon's "The Other F-Word: The Disappearance of Feminism from Our Fiction." Dixon takes on the current landscape of Canadian female-authored fiction with a real "angry feminist" eye, that I appreciate. Sometimes, I feel that as feminists we have to pull our punches too often, so as not to offend. Third-wave feminism, as the reader no doubt knows, was a big, needed leap forward in terms of inclusivity. However, Dixon and many other feminists now take umbrage with a theory of feminism that has become too scared to make a point in fear of coming across as not inclusive enough. Feminism, so the thinking goes, has become too susceptible to alternative versions and definitions (Sarah Palin, anyone?). The resulting

problem with keeping feminism undefined and mutable is that the stereotypes the second-wavers fought against creep back into public thinking and published fiction, brought back and advanced by women as well as men.

One of the stereotypes Dixon rallies against, within a CanLit framework, is compulsory motherhood. As I've said before, I'm child-free – recently I chose to have a tubal ligation to (hurr hurr) seal the deal – but I am interested in motherhood narratives, sometimes just for the reassurance that I have made the right choice for me. So, for someone like me, it's always good to read a piece that fights against the notion that motherhood is a necessary part of the female experience, though it is one of the most common. Of Lisa Moore's February Dixon writes:

To write and publish such a novel and create such a character at a time when more women graduate from universities than men sends the message that breeding is more important than education... Why coach women toward publishing and graduate degrees when Canada's successful women authors literally coach them toward mental suicide?

I don't think Dixon is suggesting that those women who have had children are now brainless (though mothers with too little sleep might argue they feel as such). Rather, that the imagined women of CanLit, and indeed some of the authors, are defined not by their own personhood, but by the existence of their children.

There are, of course, some issues with Dixon's analysis. While I agree and/or am engaged by a lot of her critical analysis of the texts, the politics fall down a bit. In returning to a more second-wave activist viewpoint, Dixon does neglect some of the things the third-wave worked so hard to achieve, mainly understanding. First off, I'm troubled by the unthinking classism displayed here.

Nothing else a woman does is universally applauded as having a baby – not earning a PhD (more women attended a friend's baby shower than her PhD defense), not becoming a lawyer (most of my lawyer friends are now stay-at-home moms), not even running for president

Not all women have the opportunity to get graduate degrees, let alone attend post-secondary education. While I did get a BA, I'm not exactly a high-powered career woman, and there are lots more like me. Are these women invisible? Is the “loss” of people like me to motherhood okay, because we don't have graduate degrees? I doubt this is what Dixon means, but her examples are not exactly pan-experiential

Dixon also assumes that “women can choose to live whatever lives they want (in this country anyway)[.]” This again, seems to speak to a certain section of Canadian female experience that is, indeed, over-represented in CanLit. Some women don't have a choice (or don't know that they have a choice) about motherhood, due to cultural, familial, or religious obligations and constraints. However, if we're going to focus more on the white, likely middle-class women who write the books Dixon is looking at, there are still issues. The thing is, a lot of women really do choose motherhood. Not to beat the fandom horse, but Kerry Clare and Marita Dachsel have a wonderfully thoughtful conversation on motherhood and writing^* posted at Pickle Me This. Many of my white, middle-class friends have, or want, kids. If motherhood narratives are popular, it must be at least partially due to the number of mothers reading and identifying with them. It's dangerous to call too many of these narratives mindless, because that view is suspect of the readership,^** and in truth, there are a lot of really smart women out there, with children, who appreciate literature on the same level that Dixon does.

While I'm critical of Dixon's piece, I also want to make clear that I really, really like it. I think it's a really great bit of feminist analysis that has me thinking about CanLit in a new way, and it's given me a critical framework that I'll definitely employ going forward. It also reminded me, through some of the works it deals with (Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Birth House^†)and the mention of Dixon's roit grrrrrl university days, that a really deserving book missed making the Top 5 of Canada Reads this year, after making it to the top 10. Bottle Rocket Hearts is the story of Eve, making her way through life and love in mid-90s Montreal. Zoe Whittall belongs to the same cohort as Dixon and I, and Bottle Rocket Hearts inspires fond memories of how transgressive we felt, before "alt" was (ironically) so common a modifier as to be completely meaningless. Eve is unsure and tough, all at the same time, and reminds me of the 20-year-old arrogance and swagger we displayed, while not having any fucking clue what we were really doing. If I'd met Eve in 1995, I'd have wanted to be her, though I was probably more like her than I think. Bottle Rocket Hearts is, I hope, a book Nicole Dixon could get behind.

^*Yet, I was also taken aback by the following comment: “My own view, of course, is that biological reproduction is intrinsic to creative work, and that the labour of giving birth and of finishing a book are pretty close to the same thing.” I felt this comment to be marginalizing to those of us who have chosen not to participate in the parenthood process (not to mention those women who – for whatever reason – can't have children but want to). The comment has since been contextualized for me, but honestly? It still rankles. I am definitely pro-mama, and I think as a society we still don't value mothers as people enough. However, we can't go so far as to assume that “biological reproduction” is a necessary pre-condition for a certain kind of work. Not only am I child-free, but I'm the second generation of my family to be adopted. This history, in part, leads me to believe that there is an over emphasis on biology and reproduction. Which is where Dixon and I meet up again.^‡

^**And this is something I find all too often with critical analysis in this country; if something is popular, it must be mindless. I feel there's a classism in this as well, and I don't believe that populism is necessarily a bad thing. But what do I know? I don't have a graduate degree.

^†It's odd to admit, within the context of a post dealing with feminism, that I read The Birth House because I saw Ami McKay give an award acceptance speech that made me cry. I ended up liking the speech more than the book.

^‡And I could also write three times as much on all the times I said “Yes!!” in my head, or on some other little things I want to engage with, but I'm trying to be ever-so-slightly focused.

This Can't Be A Coincidence

2010-11-22T11:24:00.002-05:00

Last night on Family Guy, Brian published a book with Penguin. And here's how that show portrayed a higher-up at Penguin:

This can't be a coincidence.

The Nature of Blog

2010-11-18T08:46:00.009-05:00

I've had this post about Freedom sitting in the queue for weeks now, needing to be tied together, edited, and published. I haven't looked at it since I wrote the first draft in a frenzy of undergrad-like motif spotting. Which is often what I do here; write tiny, not-great undergrad papers. Partially I do this because I'm not sure how else to write about books; I don't know how to write a real review, though I do respect those who can. I feel like I don't have enough adjectives. I also don't just want to rehash those reviews. I want to bring something else to the table. With the Freedom post, I feel like I've caught onto something that reviewers missed, but I've written about it on such an elementary academic level, I'm a little hesitant about putting it up. Because, who cares, really? This is a blog, not a class. I've been told that the way I write about books can sometimes be difficult for the reader, because it relies so much on familiarity with the text. That's a fair assessment, and I don't deny it. Again, it's just my default of writing papers, something I enjoyed a lot, but haven't done for a grade in ten years.

I know I just need to write, for the practice. I find that my more successful blog posts (successful meaning interesting, insightful, thoughtful, maybe funny) have been written without too much thought. They were initial reactions, with a little research, maybe a couple pull quotes. This makes sense, when I think about how I wrote all those A papers: the night before, or the day they were due, from scratch. I'm good under pressure, good on my feet, better off-the-cuff. So I have to endeavour to do that; not over-think, just write.

One of the problems I'm encountering, with just getting it down, is the weird editorial board I seem to have contracted. I do advertise new blog posts on my Twitter, and almost every time the first commentary I get is a spelling, punctuation, or grammar correction. (It's always a man, not always the same man, that does this. I don't know what to make of that precisely, but I don't think it's just a coincidence^*.) When I posted about Fauna a Twitter pal immediately launched into refutation mode, citing books written about Calgary. When I angrily suggested he was missing the whole point of the post, he admitted he hadn't even read it, he was just commenting on the title. And then I made this face: >_<

I started this blog, like so many do, because I simply love books. Reading is integral to my personhood. Boyfriend put new shelves up for me the other day and now I can see a small percentage of my books from my bed, and I'm filled with a sense of comfort and happiness every time I look at them. So I started writing here because I wanted to talk about books. Then I quit talking about books for a while. Then I wanted to talk about them again. My model has always been Pickle Me This^**, and though I know I'll never be half the reader or writer Kerry is, the way she writes about living with books, not only about their content, is something I strongly identify with. I wish I could post multiple times a week, but I just don't have the content in me. I want to post about everything I read, but I never do. Sometimes I just have nothing to say about a book, like A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I just finished, enjoyed a lot, and then put away. What's to say? Egan is amazing. The end.

Thanks to Kerry, I'm currently reading Ex Libris. If she is "startlingly unoriginal in loving Anne Fadiman’s books of essays, not to mention about a decade late" then I'm not sure what rock I've been living under to have never heard of them till now. Fadiman and I agree on a lot of things: a well-used book is a loved book, annotating is a good thing, finding unexpected bits of paper in a book is a joy (I love when people leave their library slips in books, so I can see what else they've read), and so forth. I do envy Fadiman her hyper-intellectual upbringing, I'm a little annoyed with how often she name drops Mark Helprin, and I'd probably stab myself in my eye if a friend ever said the following to me:

I had repaired to the King's Arms, the pub closest to the Bodleian Library, with a fellow student, a dashing but bullheaded young Scotsman who proclaimed over coffee that Homer was vastly inferior to Virgil. As a Homeric partisan, I was much miffed[.]^†

I'm hoping this is a caricature, but even still, I don't find it an endearing one. Anyway, I'm mostly positive about Ex Libris, because it does what I want to do here: discuss how books shape my life, how I interact with them, how they make me feel, how I react, where they lead me, how their physicality touches me, and how reading is now -- and will ever be -- the most important thing in my life. The writing comes much further down the list.

^*I'm sure I'm going to catch shit for reporting this, in this way, but it's the truth. No woman has ever (metaphorically) fallen upon me shouting "Oxford comma!" If pointing out errors is seen as a way to enter into the discussion, without having a literary framework, that's a flawed approach.
^**I'm sure I've said this before, several times probably.
^†Really, who talks like this?! I sort of thought, "Well, if she's maybe British..." but no, the friend is American. If accurate, this is inexcusable affectation.

On Meeting Douglas Coupland

2010-11-05T14:34:00.007-04:00

I was lucky enough to attend a conversation/lecture at Ryerson on Wednesday^*, featuring one of my favourite authors, Douglas Coupland. As a part of Ryerson's Retail Week, Coupland was there with the co-founders of Roots, talking about his clothing line. It was an interesting talk, despite the chatty undergrads who were resentfully attending. I do work in the consumer goods sector, after all, so it wasn't as if everything they discussed was irrelevant to my interests. The Roots guys talked about Canadian manufacturing, cost measures, and design and company directions. Of course, I was more interested in the book signing afterwards, with Coupland. Anyone who knows me, or reads this blog, or is Steven W Beattie, knows how much I love Coupland. It's not a blind love; there are things I haven't liked, but overall he's one of the few authors who have me excitedly anticipating a new book as soon as I hear rumour of one.

We were sitting, during the lecture, with a television personality that we know. TV, as I'll call him, went right up to Coupland after the lecture and started a conversation. My boyfriend joined in. We began walking towards the book signing table. I grinned like an idiot. Then my boyfriend introduced me. I shook Coupland's hand and sort of stammered and said “I'm sorry I'm totally starstruck right now. I get this way around authors; I almost barfed on Margaret Atwood.” Expect I think that probably sounded like a Twitter hashtag, with all the spaces removed. He sort of chuckled and said, “Oh, she's a pussycat.” Easy for you to say, man!

One of the things I've noted, time and time again, about Coupland's work is his ability to convey loneliness and isolation in perfect, heartbreaking detail. In Player One one of the main characters contemplates a life alone:

He comforted himself with the belief that a quiet life of loneliness could be its own Great Experience.

Still, it's tough being alone in a room full of people. As Coupland went to get sorted for the book signing, TV told us that he noticed that no one was talking to the author, despite the number of people heading to the table with books. “I've been there,” he said. “When people know who you are, they think they can't talk to you, so you wind up standing alone and awkward a lot.” That's why he engaged, and brought us in. People, as Martin Gore wrote, are people, and unless you're Margaret Atwood, chances are you would actually enjoy conversation with your adoring public.

I can't say enough nice things about the man, by the way. He signed my book “To Panic” with only a slight eyebrow raise. He stood there while Boyfriend took a tonne of pictures that I kept ruining with an expression I can only describe as “surprised duck-face.” He joked around with us a bit, in his sort of deadpan way. He was a regular — albeit super nice — person, for which I'm grateful. Because I was a super dork. It must take a lot of patience and heart to deal with the public repeatedly, and yet sit alone often.

<3 Motherfuckin' three.

^*Thank you so much, E!

Life of the Party

2010-10-29T10:27:00.008-04:00

So, I went to a publishing party last night. I guess it's the triumph of social networking sites that allows me to do such a thing, being out of the industry so long. I knew more people last night than I ever did when I worked in publishing. I actually had fun, I think mostly due to that fact that I wasn't working. Parties can be great, but they're also work for the folks at them. I just went as an invited guest of people I am proud to call friends. I ran into folks I know through writing this blog, and others I've met through friends. I caught up with old co-workers. I had some passable wine, I had some evil wine (oh god, I can still kind of taste it). I really, really enjoyed myself.

I spotted a lot of earnest networking by the new youngsters (man, are they easy to recognize). A couple eager young things introduced themselves to me; I guess I look old enough to be "somebody." I didn't have the heart to tell them not to waste their time, but I also didn't engage them in any social chit-chat. I can't help your career, kid. Move along.

There was some weird slimy guy there, with an accent of course^*. He seemed to know, by feel, all the bright young girl things. He complained about the Evil Wine like the rest of us, but continued to drink it, keeping a bottle in his hand. There's one in every crowd. Major Terry Richardson vibe. He's probably an author, I have no idea. I wasn't young and/or pretty enough to get felt up... er, have a conversation with.

A couple people asked me if I'd seen The Boss. For the record, I didn't see him, and I didn't bother to go looking. No throw-down; I'm just here to enjoy time with the people that matter to me. I have seen him around town though, and there hasn't been any confrontation or anything. We don't glare at each other, he doesn't try to talk to me (like he did the one time I ran into him after he fired me). We pass by. It works for me.

There's a freedom, when you leave — or are forced to leave — the industry. I've heard from people that they find their love of books again, once they were not forced to deal with them day-in, day-out. For my part, there's a relaxation in the party that I never had before. At some point, I was a young thing with something to prove, and I went to every party and launch I could. But because my position wasn't interesting enough for people, because even back then I couldn't help them, no one would talk to me at parties. I had people turn their back on me, for more networkingly lucrative options, when I told them what I did in my organization. I stopped going to parties after my first year in the industry. Who needs that sort of rejection? Now I'm simply an interesting^** person, and my company is comprised of the only people that really matter: the people who believe in me, who are behind me, and who want know me. I am so lucky to have them. I hope they invite me out again!

Last night I said "I got away with that post because I have nothing to lose." The post still comes up a lot, and that's fair. It was a Big Deal. It has sort of become my calling card, and that's fine. If you only know me from that, I don't mind. I want people to know, though, that I can only write posts like that because I can go to publishing parties and simply enjoy. I remember what it's like to have a lot more to lose.

^*No, I'm not talking about The Boss.
^**Look, I'm not going to be falsely modest here. I basically kick ass.

No One Writes Books About Calgary

2010-10-20T11:53:00.007-04:00

I read a lot of Margaret Atwood in university. Alias Grace hooked me, and I sought out everything previous, devouring second-hand paperbacks between the Rossetti and Tennyson poems, and second-wave feminist tracts. (Actually, those three things all worked rather nicely together.) Like Alice Munro and her connection to rural and small town Southern Ontario, Atwood is similarly a Toronto centered author. This is the city of her heart, despite (because of?) the time she's spend elsewhere, and it shows in her clear and detailed descriptions of the streets, the weather, civic engagement, and natural beauty. I remember Cats Eye and Robber Bride being deeply rooted in Toronto. They could not have happened anywhere else because Toronto is so important to who the characters are, and how they're formed. At the time I lived in Calgary and Toronto was a mysterious, possibly mythic location. I didn't know anyone from Toronto, everyone in Calgary hated everyone in Toronto (most without ever having been, or knowing anyone from Toronto). When I lived in Calgary it got annoying that most of my Canadian reading was based in Toronto. Sure I had the odd Margaret Lawrence on the prairies (Manitoba though, and people in Alberta don't consider that “The West”), there was Mordecai Richler's Montreal, and while I was in university, an strong East Coast literature was beginning to emerge (with Donna Morrissey being read afternoons on Bill Richardson's show), but Toronto was the real show. And no one writes books about Calgary.

About a year after I moved here, I re-read those two Atwood novels. It would be a couple years yet until I'd see the sort of house Charis owned on Toronto Island, in Robber Bride, but I understood what it meant to “[get] off at St. George and [take] the Bedford Road exit.” or walk “past the Queen Mother cafe,” which to my delight was, is, still there. So began years of getting a thrill every time I recognized a street name, a building, a restaurant, a landmark. I wanted to know the history too, so I read things like In the Skin of a Lion, and learned that the steam baths at Bathurst and Queen have been there an awfully long time. Consolation taught me the streets of my neighbourhood, extremely central and well-founded, were once extremely periphery. I read Fugitive Pieces, Once, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Unless, to name a few. Always, always, I had the thrill that a book had been written about the place I lived in, and that I could walk those streets and see those things^*. It was so engaging because it was so new; no one writes books about Calgary.

It was with a dulled-by-time excitement I approached Fauna, which is a Toronto Book^**. The shine was beginning to wear off, and I found myself initially a little put off by the Torontoness of the book. There's a scene near the beginning of the novel, told from the point of view of a raccoon, hanging around on garbage night, waiting for his chance to pry open a green bin and eat the delicious waste inside. The raccoon, of course doesn't know what a “green bin” is, or that homeowners use bungee cords to keep them closed, against an adorable^† onslaught. The raccoon knows only “slender container” bound by “a kind of stretchy, spotted snake […] hooks in place of their heads and tails.” The raccoon knows that “[t]onight's the night when the lonely, feast-filled vessels stand unguarded, fastened with nothing but a clip that any yearling could undo.” As a Torontonian, I know exactly what's happening here, but I questioned if anyone outside Toronto would know just how quickly the raccoons figured out how to open the “animal-proof” bins, and the lengths people have gone to, to keep them closed before the night of unguarded garbage. A little bit of my old prairie sensibility flared up, because this scene is really a bit of an in-joke with other Torontonians. “Center of the Universe,” Calgary sniffs. “Think they're so important.”

Fauna mostly centers on happenings in the Don Valley, and those that live in and around it, including a homeless girl and her dog, and coyotes. The coyotes are under attack from “Coyote Cop,” an angry and traumatized young man (raised in Alberta no less), who expresses his inner turmoil through his determined to wipe the coyotes out. My reaction to the appearance of the coyotes, after being reminded of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, was that the book could just as easily have been set in a place like Calgary. My parents' house backs onto Nose Hill Park, and before 14th street was extended behind the house there was very little between us and the animals. I grew up with deer, gophers, and coyotes in the yard. When a new subdivision went up on the other side of the hill, we began to see news stories on TV about how dangerous coyotes were. Homeowners were terrified when off-leash Maltese dogs and outdoor cats were attacked and eaten within close range of the park. Those of us on the original side of the hill scoffed. We'd learned long ago that you don't let your dog off leash, or your cat outdoors, if you wanted to see them again. The coyotes were simply living in a wild space, and if you enter that space, the onus is on you. So, my thought goes, why not Calgary?

Not even halfway through, it's clear that Fauna really does belong in Toronto because of its humans, who are mostly new to the city. This one of the things that makes Toronto, currently, the great place it is. From other parts of the province, the country, the world, Fauna is populated with transplants. Fauna has to be about Toronto, because there's no other city in Canada that attracts such a diverse crowd. There's nothing unusual to us about, for example, a half-white, half-Indian lesbian. Such a character might be seen as sensationalistic set in Calgary^‡, though I'm sure there are plenty of people there that fit the description. York's characters really do represent Toronto, in a way that is multi-experiential without being tokenistic. Perhaps living here means that a local reader of Fauna can simply take this as a matter of course, and pay closer attention to the inner lives and history of the characters, all of which are beautifully told and retold by York. However, I again have to wonder if someone outside the city would be able to accept all the things York cloaks in suggestion or takes as obvious, the small details and differences we as residents already breathe in everyday without noticing.

Perhaps what I'll take away from Fauna is that I need to remember all those details that struck me when I first got here, all the things I learned, and learned to love (the east end? What?!). I've got nothing against coyotes, but Darius the Coyote Cop and I share more than an Alberta heritage. I still get a thrill going over the valley in a subway car; I'm always going to feel a little bit new here. So I leave you with a long passage from Fauna, because this seems to be a pretty central experience for a lot of people who live here, native or not, and it's the best description I've read of it.

He loves crossing the Don Valley. It's been the highlight of every subway ride since he arrive in the city five months ago—that moment when the train leaves its dank tunnel for the viaduct's airy cage. He always makes it his business to stand in a doorway, even when it means shouldering someone out of the way. North-facing on the way downtown, south-facing on the way home—always the side with fewer girders, the clearest view down.
It made him giddy in those early days, feeling the long ravine open up beneath him. Much as he'd told himself he was done with backwoods life, there was something about that remnant of river stretched in its scrubby bed that cause the blood to thrill in his veins. When it was light out, the trees showed him their crowns, still black and bare; winter worked like an X-ray, the space between branches revealing riverbank and brush, trash-strewn campsites, snow and broken grass. When it was dark, the sunken forest grew. The river glinted. The roads—however jammed, however sparkling—were secondary. Some nights, they almost seemed to disappear

There's nothing like this in Calgary.

^*I also read a lot of Canadian books set not in Toronto, but mostly in Montreal. Look, CanLit, I'm done chasing you eastward, and we are not going to talk about Michael Winter okay?
^**I should definitely pickup Imagining Toronto. I'm pretty sure I used to read the blog.
^† You know what else we didn't have in Calgary? Raccoons. I'm still completely fascinated by them. I make squee noises.
^‡Oh, but things, they are a-changing. Calgary, I'm proud of you.

Catch Up

2010-09-29T12:47:00.006-04:00

I took last week off to have minor surgery. You'd think this would give me plenty of time to read^*, but mostly I slept, or lay in bed groggy and unable to focus my eyes. By the weekend I had flushed enough of the drugs out of my system and started reading something that didn't require a lot of attention: Ken Follett's World Without End. My Dad read it when it came out (unlike me, he enjoys books in hardcover), and mentioned it wasn't as good as its sort-of prequel, Pillars of the Earth, which we both enjoyed very much. I'm about halfway through right now, and he's right. I remember loving Pillars the first and subsequent three or four times I read it, but those readings happened many years ago. Perhaps Follett's writing style has changed, or maybe I've grown out of it, but I'm finding myself scoffing at some details (especially in the sex scenes, good grief), and not transported in time as I was when I first read Pillars. Perhaps I need to re-read Pillars and see what's really going on here, but I don't really have the time to devote to another 1000 page monster right now. Anyway, it's fine, it's mindless narrative, and that's about all I can handle right now.

Before surgery, I finished Torpor, the second Chris Kraus novel. It's not nearly as world-changing as I Love Dick, but the thoughtful, well-read, extremely observant, honestly struggling voice is still very much present. Kraus continues to inspire, and makes me want to build little shrines to her. For some reason, the scene in which she casually writes of hanging out with Félix Guattari, and his heroin addicted wife, in Paris while watching the Romanian Revolution on TV really stuck with me. Three paragraphs later she quotes one of my favourite authors, Angela Carter. Her life is an amazing literary theory/rock 'n' roll dream; an autobiography of a literary, feminist Nancy to Sylvère Lotringer's professorial Sid^**. Kraus, or the character Sylvie, is also my age in Torpor, dealing with the end of fecundity and the sexual magnetism that youth endows.

Sylvie remembers something her old acting teacher said when she was 22 and fucking him. She'd asked him why he left his wife and he'd replied, "When she was 35, she just became too bitter.

Once again, I tried to find an email, somehow, somewhere, but of course, no dice. I did, however, find a podcast of an interview and reading with Kraus, so the obsession continues. I feel a bit like Violette Leduc...

Sitting beside me, I have three magazines that need attention as well. I was tipped off to a Susan Faludi piece in Harper's by a friend who has a subscription. I do enjoy me some Faludi! As well, I went to Word on the Street on Sunday, and picked up the latest issue of Spacing, and subscribed to the Walrus, getting the October issue immediately.

And the library queue waits for no woman. Oy!

^*Or write. I still feel like my brains are a bit scrambled, and this entry took far too long to write, but since I'm off work today, still feeling so, so ill, I thought I'd post something.
^**This might not be nearly as weird as it sounds. Kraus was involved in the punk art community of New York in the 70s and 80s, and Sylvère is described as wearing leather jackets without shirts to teach classes, and constantly failing to meet publishing deadlines -- ie he's style over talent/substance. That said, they also marry, get a little dog, and own a house in a small town in upstate New York; I wonder how bourgeois Sid & Nancy may have become without the drugs...

Furious Love

2010-09-20T13:18:00.010-04:00

I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer. But when people die … those who are taken away from us can never come back. […] So I have decided that for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for.

You must know, of course, how much I love you. You must know, of course, how badly I treat you. But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other. […] But how-so-be-it nevertheless. (A cliche among Welsh politicians.) I love you and I always will …. Come back to me as soon as you can …

BELOVED IDIOT. I MISS YOU TERRIBLY.

— Richard Burton

I suppose it's apt that I'm writing this post on day two of an epic hangover, given the prodigious amount of alcohol both Richarch Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are reported to have put down throughout their lives. I can't say as I've ever cared too much about Elizabeth Taylor, and Burton died when I was a child, so he was never in my consciousness. However, my favourite gossip columnist (I'm not going to pretend I'm above such things) raved over Furious Love for a month, and I'm always up for a good Hollywood story.

To get access to private documents, many of them not published before, I'm sure the authors of Furious Love had to promise not to do a hatchet job on the love story of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Then again, I never got the feeling that they were pulling back from wanting to be snarky. There's a feeling of real respect and goodwill on the part of Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, for the two actors. While Burton and Taylor created quite the scandal in their day, there's no judgement in the writing, merely a spirited reporting of the facts. This is not to say this biography is simply a dry retelling of events (which for my taste, too many bios happen to be). Furious Love has excellent narrative flow, and moves along quickly, even through the frequent details of film-making logistics. More than anything, I think the best aspect of Furious Love is that it avoids being melodramatic (in opposition to what the title would suggest). It would be so easy to make an overly flowery, purple-prose laden book from the subject matter, but Kashner and Schoenberger manage to strike a great balance of journalistic distance and sympathetic interest that reminds the reader that Burton and Taylor were real -- though extraordinary -- people. There's also an interesting subtextual theory running through Furious Love about how the modern concept of paparazzi perhaps started with Burton and Taylor, as they were arguably the first couple to be hounded by the press to such a degree.

One needs only to look at the recent Eminem video/song "Love the Way You Lie" to see that we still tend to conflate "anger" with "passion." Taylor and Burton did so, perhaps because of their booze intake, perhaps they were just fiery people, but it's often said in Furious Love that it was the fighting that somehow kept their connection strong. I've had a relationship that mostly consisted of fighting (though, let me be very clear, not violence), in its last year especially, and I can't say as that ever made me feel more passionate towards him. Quite the opposite in fact. Make up sex? Forget it. More like not speaking for days, or sniping passive-aggressively. That said, there's still a part of my brain that insists that "real" love is the way it's portrayed in the "real" life of Burton and Taylor, because media have always told me so. Burton and Taylor aren't much different from a romance novel couple, and of course that's what makes them interesting to read about. One wouldn't read 400 pages of "Burton ate some cereal, then washed and dried the bowl, replacing it in the kitchen cupboard where he had found it." The Fiery Couple is what books and movies are made of. Since life is, in general, really about the cereal bowls, and if they're left out dirty, we need stories of people like Burton and Taylor to relieve us of that mundane world. The distraction, I think, is what keeps us able to deal with the cereal bowls.

I Want to Care About Your Book

2010-09-02T20:05:00.015-04:00

When you give your Dad the url of your book blog, it's inevitable you're going to write a post on said blog that might not be Dad-friendly. This is that post. Dear Dad, you may not enjoy some of the language or vague personal details in this post.

There was such a buzz, at least within nerd girl circles, about I Don't Care About Your Band when it came out. Finally! One of us! Julie Klauser is my age, judging by the stories inside; she's not a cheerleader or the popular girl, she's a "chubby" (?) Jewish redhead who's into Broadway musicals. She's a bit odd, she's smart, she's funny. Not stand-out odd, like the goth kids, or the troubled girls who wound up in group homes. Just odd enough that people forget she's there some of the time. She's that dorky kid I was in school, that no one thought would ever have a boyfriend, let alone engage in one-night stands and a series of flings. Julie Klausner and I figured out boys at some point, and we made up for lost time.

When Tiger Beatdown made a passing reference to Klausner a couple weeks back, that was all the motivation I needed to pick up a copy. Later, a friend Twittered about not quite knowing what to do with I Don't Care About Your Band. There was something vaguely wrong about the book for her. I felt it too, and having now finished the book, I have some specifics.

First, I found the overall tone to be a bit too Sex and the City. I loved Sex and the City, but there's only room for one Carrie Bradshaw. Carrie rides that line between awesome and annoying a lot, and any immitators will always fall on the "annoying" side, by virtue of not being first. While Klausner actually says something about not being Carrie, she actually kind of is. She lives in Manhattan with mystery money (her sketcky employment record does not say "apartment in the City" to me), she talks about about Manhattan as the centre of her world, and boys, and clothes, and fucking. Sure, she likes different boys and clothes than Carrie would, but the way she talks about sex is pretty similar. Yes, she throws in the references to Usenet and MST3K that the dorky girls will grok, and she likes Slater-Kinney so she's got the 90s cool chick band cred, but she doesn't show enough of this personality to convince me that she's something different than I've seen before. It's almost the same girl in new clothes (and Manhattan apartment, and boys, and fucking). All this is a shame, because when we get pure Klausner, she is really, really likeable, and probably someone I'd want to hang out with^*.

Klausner has some honestly weird and troubling things to say about gays and lesbians. She spends a chapter insisting that every straight girl procure herself a gay, as if he was a consumer product a girl simply shouldn't live without. She insists that straight girlfriends are too often fairweather, and friendships with straight men will often be complicated by sexual attraction (and activity). And you know, she's probably right about the relationships between straights. Thing is, gay men are still people and they should probably have a say in existing soley to prop up straight girls. As well, she has this weird idea about what sort of porn lesbians are into ^**.

I'm not saying I don't watch porn. Of course I watch porn, because I am not a nun. And I don't watch "erotica" with a "story" or "period costumes" in it, because I am also not a lesbian."

I realise this is an attempt at humour, Klauser being first and foremost a comedy writer. It just wasn't funny, and it rang false. It seems to me that the "erotica" is more aimed at that stereotypical middle-America minivan mom who enjoys a good Danielle Steel novel. Then again, I'm making judgments here as well. Who knows who that shit is made for. Let's just all agree it's dull, and not make anyone watch it. The point is, Klausner too often uses gays and lesbians as punchlines and props for her comedy bits, and I thought we had sort of gotten past that.

Also, little picky thing, but I hate Klausner's editor. I think they reined in her personality too much, while asking her to amp up the sex and preachy advice. In the meantime, [~~they forgot to correct her when she calls a verb a noun ("He was 'chill,' which is a noun that dicks have recently made into an adjective.")~~I stand corrected! One can catch "a chill." Still, it feels damn verb-y to me!!] they let her get away with strange anachronisms, like mentioning Miley Cyrus in the chapter where she describes being 15. Miley, my friends, was not even born then.

There's some really great stuff in I Don't Care About Your Band, like the part where she classifies vegans (Animal Rights, Anti-Chemical, and Anorexic), or her very insightful ideas on why some men want the plain girl ("The ultimate emo-boy fantasy is to meet a nerdy, cute girl just like him, and nobody else will realise she's pretty."), which she wonderfully dovetails into a warning about "nice guys." Ultimately, my problem with I Don't Care About Your Band is that it comes off more like a self-help book about ego and relationships, than a memoir. I would have enjoyed and identified with a memoir, but instead I felt like I was reading "The Alterna-Rules for Young Women." The target audience is likely younger than Klausner and I, someone who's in the midst of trying to navigate the crazy casual-sex 20s. I've lived this, and while I wouldn't mind laughing along with someone who lived it too, I don't need the slight pedantry and weird/wise older-sister vibe.

^*Except, she doesn't care about Star Wars, and that's kind of unforgivable.
^**I really wish I could remember where I read something about lesbians watching gay male porn, but I can't, and I'm SOOOOO not googling "lesbian+gay+male+porn" because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find what I'm looking for... or will I?

Canada's Most Predictable Punching Bags

2010-08-24T10:11:00.010-04:00

The Huffington Post piece on overrated authors didn't make Anis Shivani any friends. Jezebel had a rather good take on the article, with their rebuttal "Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, 'Ghetto Volume'". Similar lists were inevitable. I find these lists to be nothing more than opportunities for critics to unleash a hail of insults on those they deem unworthy, somehow, of praise, sales, and awards, and they do nothing to broaden the reading public's understanding or appreciation of literature. (I do, however, see great value in lists of "underrated authors" who can definitely benefit from exposure.)

Today, we get the Canadian list, co-authored by Steven W. Beattie, and if you read his blog That Shakespearean Rag or his other work at all, there will be absolutely no surprises for you here. The same old complaints about the same old authors appear. How Michaels and Ondaatje^* engage in overly complex tricks of language... oh excuse me, I mean "abstruse metaphoric language and self-conscious, sonorous prose." There are complaints about the derivative nature of Can Lit, which is funny in a third-hand copy-cat list, the details of which have been copy/pasted from previous reviews and blog posts, either verbatim or by rote memory.

Predictably, I want to give some love to Douglas Coupland. In the Canadian list we are also treated to complaints about Coupland's use of irony^** and pop culture, which is such a throwaway Amazon Review reading of his work. In my discussions of Coupland, I don't pay overmuch attention to these issues. Yes, these are elements of his work, but they're set pieces, not the characters or novel itself. I have always enjoyed how much pop culture Coupland puts in his novels, because that's the world I live in. I pay attention to all aspects of the world around me, not just the highbrow. I don't pretend to live in an ivory tower and I would never want to. That Coupland writes from down on the ground makes his novels work with me, instead of making me work for them. And sometimes that's okay. Every novel doesn't need to be A.S. Byatt.

To miss the attention Coupland pays to human interaction, and the consequences of the lack of that interaction, is to call Coupland "overrated." If you don't see his funny, weird, and often intensely lonely people for the recognizable human beings they are, then you're missing the point entirely. I haven't loved every novel^‡, but when he gets it right -- as in Eleanor Rigby or The Gum Thief -- Coupland can be devastatingly astute about what a commodified culture, overloaded with information, does to our psyche, and how this culture leaves some of us alone, alienated, and clinging to false talismans made of plastic and light.

Edit: I am remiss in not mentioning that Coupland can also be very funny, and has the ability to take our monstrous capitalist productions and turn them into Lego bricks of joy.

To call Coupland "lowbrow"^† is to be a self-apologist for not giving enough attention to a writer who would certainly do you the favour of close examination, should you appear in his work.

^*I don't find him completely unreadable, but I really don't enjoy Ondaatje.
^**Is it ironic that the word "lazy" appears in reference to Coupland, when this list is a pastiche of previously published opinions?
^‡Oh, jPod, how sad you make me.
^†Ondaatje is too snooty! Coupland is not snooty enough! Perhaps Canadian authors could benefit from a Snoot-O-Meter, to help them meet the exacting specifications of the critical establishment?

Open Letter to Jodi Picoult

2010-08-20T16:14:00.010-04:00

Dear Ms Picoult,
I agree, the New York Times really, really likes white dudes from Brooklyn. I noticed a while back, and the reviewers there are not real subtle in their idol worship. Further, I'm pretty sure the reviewer of the new Franzen book, Michiko Kakutani, is predisposed to hate female authored books. All this can definitely get pretty annoying.

However, I complain as a reader. You're complaining as a writer, and I have to assume that you're complaining because your reviews have been less than positive. Here's the thing: you're a horrible writer. Your situations are cliche and contrived. Your characters are more than unlikeable, they're hateful and unbelieveable. You seem to be writing to ensure a TV movie option.

You sell a lot of books and I can't figure out why. Maybe all this is unfair of me, since I've only read about 50 pages of one of your novels. I can't remember another book I've hated so much I had to put it down and quit. There are books I don't like, having finished them, but yours was the only one that so disgusted me I had to stop and give it back to the library, lest it contaminate my house further.

So maybe I just don't know enough of your work. But have you read Franzen? He's really, really good. So is Lethem. Some of the Wonderboys the NYT loves aren't all that, but those two? They kinda are. You are not now and will never be in the same league.

I'm annoyed that you co-opted a very valid complaint for your sour grapes. You cheapen and lessen the point. It almost feels like Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist. Right words, wrong people.

Next time the NYT fawns over Tao Lin, though, feel free to lose your shit.

Sincerely,
Panic

Mind Unchanged

2010-08-16T13:40:00.002-04:00

As an avowed grump, I looked forward to reading Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

The first chapter on cancer, and the relentless positivity patients are expected to embrace, is the most convincing. In fact, Ehrenreich has some very interesting things to say about cancer, and her own experience as a patient. She writes that

the rebel cells that have realized that the genome they carry, the genetic essence of me in whatever deranged form has no further chance of normal reproduction in the postmenopausal body we share, so why not just start multiplying like bunnies and hope for a chance to break out?

Ehrenreich goes on to write of studies that show a correlation between positive attitudes and immune system health. However, the Journal of Clinical Oncology notes "the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self." It's an interesting and factual take on cancer, lacking in sensationalistic scare tactics. Cancer is so often seen as something that can be wholly prevented if one just tries hard enough, cutting risk factors, being born with the "right" genes, and even thought away, as Ehrenreich reports. However, to think of a cancer as an organic part of the self is almost a radical approach, though scientifically it's a bit of a no-brainer.

The next chapters, however, are less convincing. Ehrenreich comes out against positive thinking methods involving the rubber band trick (in which you snap a rubber band against your skin when you have a negative thought), and positive thinking and list making to reprogram negative attitudes. While she doesn't mention it by name, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy employs these tactics, and is often successful in treating illnesses like depression. I find Ehrenreich's dismissal of these techniques (and later her supposition that the pharmaceutical industry prompted psychologists to prove their worth with these and other thought exercises) to be a bit heavy-handed. There's a lot of research out there that says we're way, way over-medicated for depression, and I expected some critical analysis of this. Instead, she glosses over medications, and indeed, there's some tacit approval of them.

Ehrenreich also makes some pretty tenuous connections. For example, she seems to be hinting that Positive Thinking practitioners had a part, however small, in the layoffs and corporate restructuring of the 80s and 90s. Seems to me it's more likely that entrepreneurs were taking advantage of a new market. This would actually have seemed more sinister and proved the point that motivational speakers and the like were really just wanting to cash in on a social phenomenon at the expense of people in a difficult situation, rather than having a part in creating hardship.

In her chapter on the rise of positive thinking megachurches that take sin and God out of the equation, Ehrenreich spends a paragraph snarking on the appearance of a couple of the new breed of (very wealthy) preachers. The female of the couple, Victoria, is just back from winning court case in which she was being sued by a stewardess she treated miserably on a flight. Ehrenreich is part of the crowd at the megachurch that day.

I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire's court victory over a working woman, who happened in this case the be African American. The crowd, which is about two-thirds black and Latino and appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book deal or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically.

Instead of attempting to explain this phenomenon, which would be well within the scope of the book, Ehrenreich devotes only a couple sentences, almost a literary shake of the head, an "aren't these folks silly" sort of dismissal. There's also a weird point she makes about modern megachurches that I can't shake off: Church buildings used to be built to inspire and be seen as something outside of the mundane world. "Not so the megachurches, which seem bent on camouflaging themselves as suburban banks or school buildings." A look at church architecture in Canada (I can't speak for anywhere else) from the 60s and 70s, across denominations, shows this as a phenomenon of the 20th century, not of any one particular turn of faith, though the megachurches do indeed hold more people, and are less community/neighbourhood sized.

What I find most troubling, is Ehrenreich's "patron at the zoo" way of writing. I did notice this when I read Nickel and Dimed many years ago. Ehrenreich often treats the poor and working class in her books like caged animals, with pity and disdain, instead of understanding. As mentioned above, she looks down on the "black and Latino" congregation of a couple of rich, white preachers, instead of attempting to look at how a supposedly poor group would find solace in the message. (I say "supposedly" because Ehrenreich doesn't mention actually talking to these people, she judges them simply by looking at them.) She finds certain psychologists merely silly or annoying, and makes her personal dislike known, while skimming over facts. This will be the last Ehrenreich I read, because I really can't take her classism (and possible racism!)any longer. Ehrenreich has pretensions of journalism, but her books read like a long, and in this case poorly thought-out, letter to the editor instead.

* * *
In the "things that do not suck" portion of this post, the always amazing Kerry Clare has a great post on the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and her life with feminism over at Pickle Me This.

Isolation

2010-07-30T15:59:00.003-04:00

I suppose it's become normal for "setting" (usually a city or a decade) to be a character in novels. What made me realise this, is how background the 80s are in Model Home. I was expecting lots of shout-outs to... well, everything I remember from my childhood. Instead, the references that tie the characters to a time are minimal, and a bit startling when they do appear. Because I'm so used to being bombarded by reminders of where/when a novel is happening, I wondered why the novel had been set in the 80s at all. Why not now? What makes the 80s special and integral to the storyline in a way that, say, the 90s could not have been? As part two of the novel opened, I understood the reason: The Cold War.

I was a kid in the 80s, and I basically accepted nuclear annihilation as fact. We didn't have the "duck and cover" drills of the early 60s (though I'm not sure they ever had those in Canada), but we were hyper-aware of the USA/USSR conflict, and the way it was "fought." We had Red Dawn and "Wild, Wild West"^* and "Land of Confusion" and probably about 1000 songs I'm forgetting, telling us we were just a step away from the earth being blown up six times over. Eldest son of the Ziller family, Dustin is also a product of this saturation of nuclear fear. When he awakens in the hospital, half-covered in third-degree burns, his first thought is of nuclear war.

When they told him he'd been burned, his first thought was World War III. The Russians must have attacked. He didn't remember the accident, but when they told him about it--the cigarette, the house exploding into flames--it seemed too ludicrous to be true.

The Ziller family, homeless from the explosion, and bankrupted by father Warren's investment in a non-starter of a desert subdivision, has no choice but to move to a house they own by default. The street is completely devoid of people, stinking from the garbage dump not far away, and full of scalding surfaces. Youngest son Jonas, who is blamed for the explosion in the former home, rides his bike "in a place with only one block [...] there were no pedestrians, the block was utterly, echoingly empty." They may as well be the last people on earth.

It's probably apocryphal, but there's a theory that bugs, roaches, would be the only animals to survive a nuclear holocaust. I began to think about this supposition, and the relationship of Mobile Home to Kafka's Metamorphosis^** after a couple mentions of the proliferation of roaches, and of feeling "buglike." The explosion that displaces the Ziller family to the desert also changes the Ziller boys into twin Gregor Samsas^†; hideous, unlovable, and alienated. Jonas' parents acknowledge that they no longer love their youngest child, who they assume is responsible for physically changing their eldest son into something unrecognizable from the rock 'n' roll, golden boy surfer they knew previous. The family purposely barely recognize Jonas in their midst, in an effort to keep themselves from outright hating him. For his part, Dustin retreats to his room. The life he had pictured for himself is utterly destroyed by the immense change not only in his appearance, but health and mobility.

Model Home does an excellent job of personalizing the cultural anxiety of the West in the final, escalating stages of the Cold War. The Zillers have The Bomb dropped on them, but only them. They are isolated not only within their community of no-one, but within themselves. Technology encroaches, and isolates even further. Dustin remains with his father, in the desert, watching movie after movie on his VCR. Jonas plays Joust for hours, with no possible end, as the game is unwinnable. The future's not so bright.

^*This video is as creepy as I remember it.
^**Which I'd not read before, but borrowed from the library immediately after finishing Mobile Home so I could make sure I wasn't totally off-base.
^†I'm not proposing that Model Home is at all a retelling of Metamorphosis. However, there are thematic similarities.

We Meet Again, Booker

2010-07-27T14:00:00.002-04:00

Last year I decided to go ahead and read everything on the Booker Prize Short List, though after the prize had been given out. I've consciously read Booker noms before (most memorably Darkmans: amazing), but didn't really make an effort to make a reading list out of the prize nominees.

The 2009 stand-out for me was easily Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. I was completely invested in each character, and the ending, while a bit reliant on Victorian-style contrivance and coincidence, was completely satisfying.

Wolf Hall, winner of the 2009 Booker, was enjoyable but less moving. It almost felt like a "summer read" to me. I gifted it to my Dad for Christmas, since he loves a good historical novel. I certainly get that from him. It's not often these days that my Dad and I read the same book, so it was nice to have a bookish conversation with him again. He also filled me in on what happens to Cromwell after Wolf Hall ends. As one would expect from the court of Henry VIII, it's not good.

The Little Stranger was more enjoyable for me than Tipping the Velvet, which I found a bit heavy-handed. I'd read The Children's Book a good while before the Booker list was announced, because it's A.S. Byatt, and I am a slobbering fan girl. I don't really get Coetzee, and found myself hating the dreariness of everything in Summertime. I wanted to like The Quickening Maze more than I did, but as in the Coetzee, I found pretty much everyone unlikeable (perhaps I was too put off by the portrayal of Tennyson), and was thus unable to invest much feeling for the outcome of the characters.

Yesterday, the 2010 long-list was announced, and I've not read anything on it. Which means I'll have plenty of titles to add to my library queue come the announcement of the shortlist. I hope Lisa Moore makes it, because I keep meaning to read her, and keep getting distracted by shiny objects. I hope David Mitchell doesn't make it, because I really disliked Cloud Atlas. Hell, I didn't even finish Cloud Atlas and there are very, very few books I don't finish. I felt like I was reading Tristam Shandy again. Too convoluted and proud of it^*. Not my scene, man.

I'm really looking forward to repeating my Booker Shortlist reading series. Not all the 2009 books were in the "win" column for me, but I read books I might not normally pick up, and I suppose that's the whole point of these things in the end: exposure.

^*I realise the same could be said for critical theory.

I Think I Got a C- in Critical Theory Class

2010-07-27T11:49:00.001-04:00

There's a problem with finishing a book I really, really love: I have a hard time starting anything else. I stopped and started about four different books before I was able to get into Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, which I picked up at the big Ithaca book sale in May. No idea why I bought that particular book there, since it's available in multitudes in every used book store everywhere. I'm odd. And yet, even after that, I was still stuck on I Love Dick.

This is long (for a blog post, but extremely brief for a real analysis), and I'm trying to twist my way through some theory that's new to me. It's probably nonsensical because I'm still trying to grasp so many things. Critical Theory has never been my strong suit, but I'm so intensely fascinated with it, after reading I Love Dick, that I can't help but try.

I love I Love Dick so much that I bought my own copy off Amazon, just so I could re-read and annotate it. I love I Love Dick so much that I tried, and failed, to find an email address for Chris Kraus so I could tell her how much that book meant to me. I Love Dick makes me want to read everything else Kraus has written, go back to school, and write a Master's thesis on her. And I love I Love Dick so much that I felt I had to come back and write more about it, since I basically just used it to introduce my thoughts on Russell Smith in a previous post. Yet writing this post, I know I still can't do it any justice. I really would need so much more space, and time, and education to even get close. What follows is what currently has my brain spinning.

Early on, Kraus writes about herself in the third person:

Chris was not a torture victim, not a peasant. She was an American artist, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps the only thing she had to offer was was her specificity. By writing Dick [the person, or the book?] she was offering her life as Case Study.

Throughout, Kraus introduces the reader to other case studies in love, but what these studies really are, and what they become, are introductions to the lives of individuals. Some of these people are artists, and thus possibly recognizable to people -- unlike me -- who know something about the art world. Some are activists, or writers. Some are "regular" people. It's possible, too, that some are entirely fictional. Because I Love Dick is memoir-as-fiction, it's purposely difficult, within the realm of this text only, to guess at the "authenticity" of the accounts, and it's possible that one shouldn't. In writing this book, Kraus brings into existence lives unknown to the reader, including her own. In other words, by writing to Dick, she writes herself into existence.

In the afterword, Joan Hawkins notes:

And while Kraus doesn't quote Guattari until late in the text, his presence is already felt in the first letter. In fact, what's interesting is Chris' idea that you can somehow use Baudillard's notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Delueze and Guattari's notion of intensification. And that perhaps is the theoretical drive behind the entire project, as the letters and the simulacrum of a passion which receives little encouragement emerge as the truest and best way outside the virtual gridlock and into Deleuzian rematerialization of experience.

Simulacrum is a new concept to me, but if my novice (and rusty theoretical) reading is correct, Kraus plays with the notion that "real" lives might not exist until they become a form of hyper-real, lived through life, through the author, then finally reader. The Wikipedia entry on Baudrillard's theory of Simulacra and Simulation states that "today there is no such thing as reality" Our world is one "in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced." When Kraus writes about a life, in a fictional way, it is a reproduction of a life lived, which is made more real with every reading, by a stranger, of each or every life. Each printing, or reproduction, of I Love Dick is an affirmation of these lives. While it is Baudrillard's opinion that hyper-reality renders experience meaningless, I feel that in working with a text like I Love Dick, simulacra can create an authentically meaningful experience for a reader who might not have had the opportunity otherwise.

There's an interesting typo that happens repeatedly -- but not consistently -- which I have to think is intentional: Kraus often confuses "it's" and "its." There is, I think, a purposeful mutability between "possessing" and "being" throughout I Love Dick. Dick is angry that he has become part of Chris' story ("I found the situation initially perplexing, then disturbing") but does Chris not own Dick, if she brings him into being (as postulated above)? Only through her authorial ownership, do Dick and the others exist.

* * *
Speaking of ownership, I tweeted the following, which some viewers found disturbing:
"I love cracking a spine so the book can lay flat for me to copy from it."
I get that some people like to keep their books more pristine, but as I said in my next tweet "I live with books. I mark them, I crease them, I use them and they look it. Dog-eared and underlined. LOVED."^* I sometimes sleep with books beside me, and they get rolled on. I carry books with me, and they get banged up. It's interesting, the differences in how we treat our books, as book lovers. I don't think one approach is better than any other. The way we love books is as individual as the books we choose to love.

^*I do want to note, as I did on Twitter, that I only do this to books in my personal collection; I try very hard to keep library books in the condition in which they were loaned to me.

I Don't Hate Catholics, and Neither Should You

2010-07-15T12:29:00.010-04:00

"The Vatican issued a new set of rules Thursday to respond to the worldwide clerical abuse scandal, cracking down on priests who rape and molest minors and the mentally disabled." The document also states that ordaining a woman is a sin on the same level. That's right, anyone who ordains a woman is, to the Catholic Church, as bad as someone who sexually molests children. The actual sin, is ordaining anyone whom a bishop^* has not given the okay to ordain, but since that permission will never be granted for a woman (and I use the word "never" consciously, given the context under which the action is described in the aforementioned document), that sin will always be as great as the destruction of a child's life. Of course, women and children always get lumped in together, and the Catholic Church has a pretty bad record with both. This is pretty offensive stuff, but it's unsurprising given that the Church is run by men.

Here's the point of this post, and weirdly, it's not to kvetch about the Catholic Church: I can't post this to Facebook. My first instinct on hearing the news this morning, was to put up a link on Facebook, and say "Oh look, The Dudes in Rome have done it again." I've done so before, when an American nun was excommunicated because she told a pregnant women that she was allowed control over her own body, to save her own life. I framed it as a feminist issue, because it is. I posted a link to an article about the case to my profile.

Catholics don't have a lock on denying women agency over their own bodies. In fact, most of the American anti-choice agitators are Protestant. Moreover, religious people aren't the only ones who openly practice misogyny. My point, when posting about the nun, is that anytime you have a group of (mostly) men running something, women are going to get the short end of the stick. That's the way it works. It could be sexual harassment in publishing, the Catholic Church, or the Canadian government. Of course, with a total lack of female voices in positions of power, the Catholic Church will commit especially egregious crimes against women. This does not mean that religious people are bad. This is one of the responses I got, however, on Facebook.

A dude missing the irony gene decided to tell me what is and is not a feminist issue. "I don't see this as a feminism issue at all," he said. "It's another notch in the RCC's hypocrisy belt. I still say draw the line: You either condemn the entire organization, or you endorse their behaviour." He went on to say "Focusing on the feminist slant only imposes a different form of oppressive discourse." Yep, if I'm interested in how women are treated, I'm imposing an oppressive discourse. The commenter's basic argument was that the Church, not the men who run it, are the source of oppression. Rather obviously, I disagree.

This went back and forth for hours but it's not isolated. I've seen people trash religion all over, even on the pages of people who are deeply committed to their faith. I've read of someone being "disappointed" that a celebrity they liked is an active Catholic. It's en vogue to paint people who believe in God (however you define that god) as stupid and/or evil, in part due to a mindset Terry Eagleton calls "Ditchkins" in his excellent Reason, Faith, and Revolution. The Dawkins/Hitchens school takes dogmatic -- and weirdly evangelical -- atheism as a higher calling. I have seen a form of hate spewed forth from Dogmatic Atheists directed to the religious, that I have not seen from those who are practicing Catholics, Jews, or Muslims (and yes, I count all these among my friends) in the other direction. Frankly, I'm fucking sick of it, and I call it out whenever I see it. Atheism and evil are not mutually exclusive.

I've been everything from a baptized COS Presbyterian, child atheist, LDS church attending friend, atheist again, Wiccan,^** possible Jew, to finally agnostic. The thread that runs through my life, is that atheism never lasts long. I always come back to knowing that there's something out there, and I think it's bigger than me. I don't know what "God" is, but I think it's a mistake to discount it because evolution is real. I also think some atheists make a huge mistake in engaging in a form of bigoty because it's fashionable. There are certainly horrible things done in the name of religion, but in the absence of God, a lot of horrible things would still have happened and continue to happen.

So I won't post this to Facebook, because frankly I don't feel like reading all the misdirected hate.

Fight the real enemy.

^* Archbishop? Cardinal? I'm not really sure who gets to make these decisions.
^**It was the 90s. I was 19. Most of my cohort was Wiccan at some point.

Respect

2010-07-07T20:12:00.008-04:00

A small note that turned into a larger note...

Lisa Rundle is going back to work at Penguin. For. The. Win.

I can't tell you how happy that makes me. She fought, she won, and she's going back. This outcome is far too rare in any sexual harassment case. I thought she had a boatload of courage to speak out, and to take action. To go back, and take her rightful place, is just a whole new level of amazing. Twitter chatter today had some opinions on how difficult it would be to go back to your employer after this. I don't doubt it will be. I'd like to say I'd do the same, I'd love to do the same, but I'd be scared too. I hope you're not scared, Lisa. You have so many of us behind you.

The coverage (I can find on google) of this has been pretty interesting. Most of the articles mentioning Rundle's return are really about the appointment of Mike Bryan, with a mention of Rundle in a later paragraph. I suppose there aren't many people who are able and willing to go on record about how they feel about Rundle returning to work, so they need the stuff on Bryan to fill the space. I get it, I'm just more interested in her.

Not for nothing, but it turns out that Bryan — Rundle's new boss, yes? — met his now-wife while he was her manager at a bookshop. Thanks to Steven W. Beattie for this little gem:

Some years passed, and books also brought Bryan and his wife, Heather Adams, together. He was working as a manager in a bookstore in the north of England and she was the “Saturday girl” there – which means, he explains, that she came to work only on Saturdays.

Yeeeeeeah.

Crazy Love

2010-07-04T22:00:00.007-04:00

The arteries of the hand & arm that write lead straight into the heart -Chris Kraus

A couple weeks ago, Sady of Tiger Beatdown wrote one of the best (online) things I've ever read, on the nature of internet feminism, and being a bad feminist. The catalyst for that post was a book called I Love Dick, which I felt to be a must-read. Sady wasn't wrong about the power of this book, its honesty, heart, and intelligence. Of course, all readers bring their own baggage to a reading experience, and I got some additional things out of I Love Dick. I found complicated and wonderful musings on the nature of love: how and why we love, how our politics can get in and get pushed out of the way, and how we use and lose our brains, all in pursuit of the object of our desire. One finds, through author Chris Kraus' honesty, that nothing really changes from the all-or-nothing days of adolescence. Love can still make you crazy: you re-think and over-think, write and re-write. It's through the process of writing to Love -- and I feel that the titular personage of Dick is ultimately a stand-in for the emotion itself -- that the political and personal become delineated, detailed, and finally, finely, understood.

I Love Dick also elucidated the book I finished previous to it: Russell Smith's Girl Crazy. In one of the early letters to Dick, the object of Chris' unrequited and inexplicable love, she writes the following:

The "serious" contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the author, everybody else is reduced to "characters." ^*

In Girl Crazy our hero/anti-hero is Justin. I began reading Girl Crazy a couple days after Smith's weird Globe and Mail piece, though not because of it. It was evident pretty early on that Justin is a stand in for Smith, the wordy nerd^** who longs for something Other. He finds that in Jenna, the archetypal wild girl that nerdy boys have always dreamed of, but never seem to get. She's the stripper with the heart of a poet; a girl who offers all orifices and speaks about philosophy, though at a second grade level. She's just slutty enough, and as such, lacks depth (as Zoe Whittall pointed out in her review). Justin's educated female peer group is no less shallow. They're catty when Jenna meets them, and late in the novel Justin's ex-girlfriend refuses any advance into territory that is unfamiliar or slightly risque^†. All this, of course, leads me to wonder if Smith really does love these PR girls for their brains.

Girl Crazy isn't a bad book. It's a quick, interesting read, with some glimpses of real emotion. However, when Justin walks off into the sunset with the phallic adjunct of a gun in his pants, one might conclude that what really makes the author/character crazy, is his own dick.

^*See also, Sady's excellent piece Fond Memories of Vagina: Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow

^**There's a Monty Python joke on pg 27. That's high-level nerd.

^†The virgin/whore dichotomy is alive and well.

Russell Smith is Awesome, According Russell Smith

2010-06-24T10:49:00.010-04:00

From the missing the point files, Russel Smith writes about what a swell guy he is to not sleep with the women who work for him (or rather, his publisher):

I need these people working at their best and most relaxed. They make me look good. If I made any of my colleagues nervous about talking to me or seeing me then I would only be damaging myself. They wouldn’t want to help me. So you could say it’s a selfish self-control. Hell, even a consensual relationship would be idiotic: I need my colleagues to be objective and unemotional. And I need my career more than I need the ego-boost of impressing a lady. Perhaps I’m getting old, but believe it or not, I actually value my colleagues’ professional abilities more than their beauty.

Which is tough to believe, given the space he devotes to telling all the LAYDEEZ in publishing how smokin' they are. By the way, if you're not 32, gorgeous, with a graduate degree^* from one of the best universities in the country, you're invisible. Because according to Smith, publishing is absolutely filled with these women. That's the "truth." Except, it's not. At all. Publishing is filled with bookish girls, nerdy girls. As Stacey May Fowles pointed out, working in publishing is a "labour of love." It's not the pay and the glamour that attracts women (and men) to the industry, because there isn't a lot of either. It's the chance to work with the love of our lives: books.

If Smith is attracted to women because of their brains, that's one thing, but the article makes it sound like publishing is filled with Runway Model PhDs turned publicists. (Granted, publicists have more pressure on them to look good — way more). Then he wants to be a hero for managing to keep things professional. Hell, maybe he is, since so few manage to do so. I could do without the massive self-congratulations though.

Edit: Something just struck me: isn't it amazing that an industry so "dominated" by women (as Smith points out) is one of the lowest paid and hardest to get into? If we're so dominant, how come all these really educated women are making so little? Look, I know the margins on books are next to nothing, I know the industry as a whole makes next to nothing, but.. yes. Amazing.

^*Actually, the graduate degree thing might be right. You need one to be an assistant these days, the field is that crowded

Sex & Fantasy (But Not Like That)

2010-06-16T20:53:00.016-04:00

In a moment of extreme cynicism^*, I once said: "Every time a woman has sex, it's a transaction."

The characters in Sub Rosa are women who have sex for money. However, the book manages to be rather unsexy for the most part. I hope this was a conscious choice on the part of the author, Amber Dawn, because it works here. The book is a fantasy, about another world, or parallel universe, where sex work is always extremely well-paid, safe, and glamorous. Even the downtrodden on Sub Rosa are Goth Lollis who reside in -- to steal a phrase -- a majestically disheveled mansion. Perhaps, it is an effort to normalize sex work in the context of a unreal novel. I do appreciate Sub Rosa for attempting to be a female-led fantasy quest novel. I never could get through The Hobbit; I tried so many times to read the Shanara series when I was in grade school; I couldn't even get into Kushiel's Dart^**. Perhaps it's that Sub Rosa still has a hand in the "real" world, that kept me interested. More likely, I think an author finally set aside whatever it is I find so tedious in the usual fantasy novel, and just gave good story.

I don't think I'd be too out-of-line to call Amber Dawn sexually progressive. It's clear she's into shaking up perceptions of what sex is, or should be. So why is it, that in a book which attempts to normalize and humanize sex workers, our heroine is, at the beginning of our story... a virgin? I mean, what!? How are we not past this trope? I remember the first, last, and only Jodi Picoult novel I tried to read. I don't even remember what it was called, but I do remember how our heroine finds the man of her dreams, is assumed a virgin, and never tells him different, because he's so incredibly invested in her "purity." I think I was about 50 pages in when I stopped in disgust. Right, also, Jodi Picoult is not very good, but the point is, why isn't this whole cult of virginity over already^†? What year are we in? Why is virginity still so important? Dawn doesn't dwell on Little's virginity, and it's only mentioned a couple times. Still, I was bothered by it, and couldn't help dwelling. What am I missing here? It's a small detail that got me thinking a lot, but overall Sub Rosa worked for me.

* * *

Yep, I just talked about sex after I talked about sexual harassment. No, I don't see a problem there. Anyway, the Quill Blog linked me (with permission) yesterday. Book Ninja followed suit this morning, and then somehow The Huffington Post got a hold of the post^‡. My hit counter exploded.

Hi, People.

So many of the hits have been from publishing houses, and media sites. Names I spent my whole adult life wanting to work for. The irony of getting their attention only after I have likely burnt my last bridge is crushing my ribcage a little bit right now. *ow* In the end it's fine, because this whole thing isn't really about me. Weird head-space though.

I was talking to the Boyfriend a bit about it all, and he wondered how Boss could even live with himself. I'm not defending or making excuses, but Boss does not live in a vacuum. He had a corporate culture behind him that permitted and excused his behaviour. That corporate culture is part of a larger culture that still undervalues women as people, and overvalues them as receptacles. These "incidents" aren't isolated, they're symptoms of something larger, and you know, ladies, we're not "there" yet. Wherever the hell "there" is... sometimes it feels like they keep moving it on us.

^*Ah, but did you know? Romantics make the best cynics
^**A book which is supposed to be incredibly sexy, and kinky, and all that, and I was just bored.
^†Pick up Jessica Valenti's excellent The Purity Myth.
^‡That's not me in the photo. We didn't even have a water cooler!

Day Two

2010-06-15T12:40:00.008-04:00

When I wrote yesterday's post, I linked it on my Twitter account so my friends could read it. Over 500 hits later, I'm humbled and stunned that it has traveled so far. Thank-you, everyone, so many of you, for your kind linking and for your support.

On Twitter, yesterday, I said that if I can help just one woman call "bullshit," then I'll have done something good in the world. Or maybe get someone to think, "Wow, this isn't my fault." Because it's not your fault, and you're not asking for it, and you have a right not to be treated this way. Please remember that.

If you've subscribed to this blog^*, but haven't read anything else, I want you to know this is generally a humble book blog, and the talk will go back to that soon. You should also know I'm a feminist, and I'm not afraid of that word, or the politics that go along with it. If none of this is your bag, jump ship now. If you're interested, I'm very happy to have you along for the ride.

I do wish I had written a better, more coherent post, but it was the sort of thing that you write up in five minutes, and hit send before you can talk yourself out of it. Truthfully, I might have deleted had it not been linked within the first couple moments of its life. I'm glad I didn't delete. I'm glad you read. I hope, one day, more will write their own stories. I hope we can blow the lid off this thing, because I know; it's not just me either.

^*Thank you, too, anonymous commenter. I've set up a button for that purpose. I never thought to do such a thing!

What It Feels Like For A Girl

2010-06-14T15:28:00.013-04:00

Ever since the news about CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar's, departure came out, I've been thinking about making this post. About how much I could say, and whom it would implicate, and what would happen. In the end, I need to write this post, because it turns out a lot of women are silenced in publishing, by the small nature of the industry, and by the fact that most of the execs are men. I'm not in the industry any more, and I'm not going to name names. I am going to write about it.

I worked in a very small office, with a male boss. When I interviewed with my female soon-to-be-supervisor, we talked job experience, qualifications. When I had my second interview with the Boss, we talked about what music I liked and what I did on the weekends. This set up the "good cop/bad cop" dynamic I would work under for three years. She was mean, he would soothe our wounds. He was our buddy, she was the task-master.

I worked in an office of all women, save for the two six-month terms the two males lasted. Other than Supervisor, we were all under 30 when we were hired, and for most of us it was our first real job in publishing, after school and internships.
The atmosphere at the office was very casual. We were encouraged to view each other more as friends than co-workers. We laughed, we talked, we all went out drinking together. As friends, we were expected to talk about our relationships. So many many meetings disintegrated into conversations about whom we were dating. Those conversations often led to discussions of our sex lives, sometimes in graphic detail; the exact sort of conversations you'd have with your friends. We were young, we were among "friends," and we thought nothing of it. I'd often joke about "Boss's harem," though I was more right than I thought I was.

I have anecdotes, and hearsay about what my co-workers have gone through, with that Boss. I won't relate them here, because those are their stories to tell. I will tell you that on several occasions, outside of work hours, I was propositioned by the Boss. Once, at a club after a work dinner, all of us drinking till last call, he leaned in and said "You are a very sexy woman." I laughed it off. Like I laughed off the time we split a cab home from a publishing party and he said "Hey! Let's fuck!" I babied him, stuck in my own stupid Stockholm syndrome. "Now you know that wouldn't be a very good idea. You're drunk, and high, and I know you're not in your right mind." I got out of the cab at the end of my street, and let him go home alone. He apologized the next day, laughing about it. I told him not to worry, I wasn't "going to sue or anything." It was all just a big joke.

I flirted back, when he'd flirt, and I'm ashamed. But I blame him. I blame the way he manipulated us into thinking it was all part of the job, the "culture" of the office. We were often told to "entertain" people at our parties, like we were geisha. Dress sexy, be the first ones on the dance floor, get drinks. Looking back, I feel like we were supposed to represent not the brains and talent of our office, but the tits and ass. Lucky for him, we were a smart, hard-working bunch of people, and we managed to make that place work. That made him look good too. You know, I'm still not sure really what he does, other than take buyers to lunch. His tales of business trips always involved a lot of drinking, eating, and weed-smoking. At Book Expo, he'd point out all the women he'd slept with.

Some of my old co-workers still defend him. I can't begin to imagine why. Maybe if my termination from that place -- and let me make it clear I assuredly was not let go for my failure to sleep with the Boss^* -- hadn't happened, I'd still give him a lot of leeway too. Maybe I'd still think he was a nice, but screwed-up guy. Right now, writing this post, I feel like my termination was a gift, so I could have the clarity to look back and say "No. You were wrong. This was wrong." I have been at my current job almost two full years, and no one's asked me if I like it up the ass yet. I'm pretty damn okay with that.

Edit: I had anonymous commenting turned off, due to spam. I've turned it back on, for the time being, in case you want to comment, but don't feel comfortable doing so under an online identity. I went through and removed all pictures of myself from this blog after publishing this post, so trust me, I get it.

^*Shit, maybe it was.

Starting Over Easy, Gently Please

2010-06-06T22:22:00.017-04:00

Last night a friend said to me "every act of writing is an act of starting over." This, after I told him I couldn't possibly write here any more. So I'm trying again. I miss the process of thinking more about the time I've spent with a book, rather than just consuming it.^* All I can do is try. So here we go again, and be gentle please, I'm rather out of practice.

I still read the New York Times Book Review now and then, because I'm poncy like that. I try to pay particular attention to fiction reviews of authors I've never heard of, because at this point in my reading career, I prefer variety and new voices, to reading the complete works of one author, or re-reading an old favourite. This (not altogether positive) review of Bloodroot caught my eye, and into the library queue it went.

I have a proclivity for multi-generational sagas, and Bloodroot delivers, in the typical non-linear fashion of such things. The novel centres around Myra, the granddaughter of the first narrator, and the mother of subsequent speakers. The family is somehow "cursed," though their lives are no less difficult and tragic than others around them. The curse the family seems to hold onto, to explain their circumstances, could be equally applied to any of the neighbours or in-laws they come in contact with, with varrying degrees of intimacy. To illustrate that no one character is immune to this curse, the antagonist, Myra's husband John, is given voice at the very end of the novel, to show he too is only human, and suffers from social and familial difficulties that have shaped him into the extremely flawed human being he is.

Two related themes are prominent in Bloodroot: escape and incarceration. We are told that generations of women in Myra's family have "itcy feet" that keep them up at night, and many have difficulty remaining indoors for any length of time. They howl, they jitter, and they run from their mountain cabin with the first man that will take them away, mistaking "escape" for "love." What these women invariably find, however, is that life away from the mountain, down in the town, is more brutal and prison-like than they could have imagined. Myra's mother Clio falls to drink, and mental illness. Myra, too, is caged by the violence enacted upon her by her husband, twice being literally imprisoned, in the crawl space beneath their rundown house. Myra escapes her husband and flees with her twins back to the mountain, only to be found and judged an incompetent mother. When this last blow to her fragile state of mind comes, it reduces her to animalistic instincts, and she physically attacks. She is sent to a Nashville mental institution, where she spends the next decades.

Myra's children both spend time in detention centres. Johnny, her son, burns down his paternal family's hardware store, after he finds they want nothing to do with him. Laura assaults a children's aid worker, who comes to take her child away, in much the same way her mother did, resulting later in her incarceration. However, Luara is able to restrain herself somehwat, knowing that further outbursts of violence and mad behaviour won't help her get her child back, and moreover, she makes a conscious decision to break the cycle -- or curse. "I was fixing to bust out fighting again," she says. "But then I remembered how awful it was for me and Johnny, seeing Mama go wild. I didn't want to mark Sunny like Mama done me. I forced myself to be calmer."

Geographic and institutional barriers, however, stand-in for the true binding presence of violence, which touches the lives of everyone in the novel. If a man you repeat the violence, if a woman you crave it, because it means that you're cared for. Myra craves this ultimate possession proposed by John. He says "I want to marry you. But if you're going to be with me, you belong to me. I can't have it no other way" and she readily agrees, cheekily assuming "it works both ways." In a later section, John tells of the violence done to his own mother, which he unconsciously re-enacts on Myra, though time and distance are able to give him a perspective on the issue. In a rumination on the past, John notes, "Since I quit drinking and got a few decades older, I can look back and see how mean and crazy I was myself. I figure I ain't nobody to judge the way Myra acted, or where she ended up." Distance, however, is a luxury given only to males; men are free to move far away, and often do, but women only move by a few miles, into the houses of their husbands, and lives of drink, mental illness, and violence.

Bloodroot is compared to The Color Purple on its jacket, which I assume is a thematic comparison. The modern reader has likely come across many narratives about domestic violence, since The Color Purple. We are aware that those abused often abuse in turn, so Bloodroot doesn't really break new ground here. The New York Times tossed the word "gothic" around, and I suppose Bloodroot could loosely be termed as such. The curses and visions, decaying homesteads situated in a miasma of industrial chemicals and railroad noise, hysterical animalistic women, and dark family secrets can indeed be viewed as gothic devices. However, I think Greene makes a conscious decision to show that the horror is actually in the everyday details of familial violence, which in the end respects no border or class strata, but replicates itself through generations. Like a curse.

Ultimately, I feel like I've been through Bloodroot before, and I had a strange detachment^** from some really horrific storylines. Maybe that's the point, I'm not sure. If you live a life of violence, for any period of time, maybe you check out and see that life like a reader or writer, instead of a participant.

^*It's appropriate that my booklist tracking is on a companion site of All Consuming

^**A rural-south-Americana novel I found far more moving, was the excellent Strange as This Weather Has Been, by Ann Pancake, which was in my top 5 list of 2007 (as requested by Steven W Beattie).

Quotes Without Context

2009-04-02T12:05:00.000-04:00

"If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable."
-Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

"[A]n unhealthy soul requires a healthy body."
-Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Silence

2009-01-03T11:24:00.004-05:00

In April of 2008 I had the rug pulled out from under me. My already weak career trajectory took a sharp turn. I was no longer employed in publishing. Everything I wanted, my entire adult life, became completely unreachable to me. And for a couple weeks, I stopped reading. I couldn't do the one thing that I'd always done well. Picking up a book made me want to vomit. My entire life was different.

The first book I opened, when I could make my eyes work again, was The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Yeah, I wasn't in a great mood.

Eventually, I went back to reading fiction, but it's no longer the passion it was. It's simply instinctive now. I can't blog about books anymore, because as soon as I finish them, they slide off me, like dollar-store fridge magnets.

The weird part about all this, is the number of books I have read this year; it's actually up from last year. Even with the two-week blackout. Maybe because I'm not thinking anymore, just devouring.

So here's the 2008 list of the 58 books I read.

Water, Water, Everywhere

2008-04-17T20:28:00.004-04:00

I just finished Nikolski and I can barely breathe. What a glorious way to drown.

It's everything they said it would be. I can't even begin to think I could do this book justice in reviewing it. Just read it.

Wild West

2008-04-16T09:33:00.005-04:00

I had some outside responses linking to my last post, which I wasn't really expecting.

I'm always surprised when Steven W. Beattie links me, because his is the sort of writing I aspire to. I don't know if I'd ever want to review books professionally, but to be able to talk about them on a level slightly more academic than "durrr, book good" would make me happy. While Beattie didn't agree with me, there was a good discussion over there.

I found another write up on the offending op-ed (via Bookslut), and hoped the author of that blog would come over here to see what I had to say. Of course, putting that link in the comments directs all sorts to my post, and one of those sorts had less kind things to say^*. In the comments section of that post, he said something like "I don't need to be right, I just want people to think." Which, in his responses to my comment, doesn't really seem to be the case. Anyway, according to his comment to me, I invented the concept of male privilege, which I guess makes me one of the greatest feminist thinkers of our time. SWB, you were right about me all along! Ha!

Really, this is all just musing on the nature of the internet. Two writers who disagreed with my view point linked me, and I find it odd. Beattie, well, we do have a back and forth. Stranger "Academic" Man? As I said to him in his blog, I think he used my write-up because it was easy to pick apart. I don't spend too much time on my blog posts: I don't get paid for this, have a regular readership of about five people, and write here for fun. I'm not in academia, or the business of writing, producing, or reviewing books.

I'm not saying I don't stand behind what I put up here. Of course I do. And it's public, it's for everyone to see, and people will take what they want from it. However, people also take the internet really, really seriously, when most of the time, it's not. I have a free site on Blogger because I was too lazy to deal with the layout issues of Typepad. I update a couple times a month. This blog is not a serious discussion of the state of literature, or feminism, or the weather. It's simply a "brain dump." It was the place I put all the stuff I didn't want to bore my friends with. Still is.

I do have to think, too, that there must have been something to that Orange Prize post, to get random people on the internet quoting it. Perhaps it wasn't so poorly written as to be ignored completely?

I'm not new to the internet by any means. I tooled around on Usenet, where I learned hard lessons about the permanence of words online, and their ability to misquoted, misconstrued, and willfully misunderstood. I know human nature is such that if someone is unwilling to see your viewpoint, there's nothing you can do (and years on the internet taught me that there's little use arguing it). And yet... and yet it's still so unsettling to see my words chopped up on the page of a stranger^**. To see them miss the point completely, in their quest to denounce the fiendish, feminist foe. How the heck did I become an example? And of what?

^*Bloggers live and die from hits. Why do you think I'm not giving him any?
^**And, granted, all blogs use others' words as fodder. Mine is no exception.

Orange Prize Brings Out the Neanderthals... Again

2008-03-19T10:18:00.011-04:00

Every year when the Orange Prize lists are announced (long or short), someone steps up and says that the women-only prize is "sexist" and not needed. Every. Damn. Year. Boring! Yet rage-inducing! Such ambivalence!

This year, they've trotted out my beloved A.S. Byatt to do the dirty work (it's okay, Antonia, I still love you). Bah. I'm not going to get into all the arguments (wooops, I actually do, further down), since about three people read this blog, but there's no such thing as a reverse -ism, friends, and until women are equal players in the world, things like the Orange Prize are, yes, still needed. Consider that the most recent winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, Kate Christensen, is one of only a handful of women to do so.

And the opinion pieces come out of the woodwork. Here's another one, from Telegraph, that I'm purposely not linking to (for several reasons, the hateful reader comments being but one):

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers.

First, I'm not sure how it is in the U.K. but in Canada, something like 80% of the workforce in publishing is female, while only 3% of the executive is.^* So, tell me, where is the real power? Secondly, "they" sell most of the books do they? You mean most of the people in the pink ghetto of retail are women? Well yes, that's true. Or do you mean female authors sell more books? If that's the case, then you're going to have to be more clear in your writing, and back that up with some stats. I'd love to see them, because I'm definitely interested.

The author of this silly piece seems to think that women are a "dominant" group, like "whites" (wrong). He continually makes these sorts of comparisons between gender and race based oppressions. While -isms do work together to create layers of oppression, comparing oppressions (sexism and racism in this article), is very, very tricky business (see Hilary v Obama), and really shouldn't be done. Ever.

Then, he casts every woman he comes in contact with as unable to defend their position with logic; their only tactic is to "hit him on the head," literally or with "verbal abuse." He was called, and I quote, "a BUM." How he must suffer! Personally, if I was faced with these tired old arguments against women-only institutions, I'd be prone to violence too. Not because I'm unable to engage in "mature debate," but rather because my opponent has set the bar so low with their reactionary drivel, a hit on the head is the only logical response.

And P.S.: the patriarchy is not "a trick that men played on women for thousands of years." Leave it to a man to take millennia of world-wide, systematic oppression, abuse, and subjugation and minimize it down to something like putting a whoppie cushion on your chair. That, my friends, is what we call privilege. Additionally, with the implication that women fell for this "trick" for so long, the writer once again gets to call womankind stupid.

But yeah, we're all like totally equal and powerful and shit. *headdesk*

My ex-pat friend Axel did mention in the comments a while back, how right-wing the Telegraph is, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised to see this sort of thing published there.

I've gotten into ~~arguments~~ mature debates at Bookninja about this sort of thing, and it's unhelpful that there aren't (that I know of) statistics on how many books are published by men and women each year (for the casual observer, it seems pretty even in the fiction realm), how big the advances are for men vs women, that sort of thing. This is a casual observation, but I have noticed The New York Times often gets really, really excited over quirky, clev-ah, first time male novelists, giving them pages and pages and pages of press^**, yet women don't get the same treatment^†. There have been studies that indicate that women are the bulk of the fiction readers, but nothing so much on the writing front. I'd be interested to know, at any rate.

The Orange Prize long list is here.
I've read:
Jennifer Egan The Keep
Anne Enright The Gathering
Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals
Based on my small list, I'm pulling for Egan. The Keep was one of the most transporting things I've ever read.

^*This is based on my memory of a Quill and Quire industry survey I read in 2005. I doubt things are 50/50 as of this writing. Call me a pessimist.
^**I'm sorry, please allow me to indulge my incredibly shallow side. Look at that photo!! If I saw that guy in a coffee shop, my first thought would be "douchebag."
^†Sarah Seltzer, in the latest issue of Bitch, addresses the anti-feminist bias at The NYT, that I mentioned in this post. Unsurprisingly, Seltzer writes about it far better than I did. Well worth a look.

Visiting Lives

2008-03-18T09:55:00.007-04:00

Early-to-mid 20^th century British literature is a particular favourite of mine (The Rainbow is in my Top 10 of books). Thus, I've been meaning to read Brideshead Revisited for a long, long time now. I read this article earlier in the month, and was reminded, once again, of this glaring gap in my repertoire. So on Friday I went book shopping, picking up the latest issue of Bitch upon walking in the door, then heading over to the fiction section. Found Brideshead, then wandered a bit. Browsed the biographies, picked up, then rejected the latest Hardy bio. Looked up and saw a biography of the Mitford sisters.

The letters of the Mitfords have recently been compiled and published, and if I remember correctly The Globe and Mail reviewer was rhapsodic about the family^* (the review is behind the stupid, outdated Globe paywall); I was intrigued. Since finances are a bit tight, I had to choose only one book. I've read nothing but fiction all year, so I decided to put Brideshead away, thinking that the Mitford story would at least be a change of pace. Of course, turns out two of the elder Mitford sisters were pals with Evelyn Waugh in their early years, and Brideshead is based on parts of their circle. So the next book up, should definitely be Brideshead. It's fate! Unless, of course, something in my library queue comes in.

Biographies can be really painful for me to read. They're not a genre I usually enjoy, though a well-written one is an excellent thing, so I continue trying them. The Sisters is one of those excellent biographies. I'm about 200 pages in having been reading only for a couple days. One might make the argument that it's the subject that can make or break a bio, and the Mitfords are very interesting subjects indeed. However, I once read an Ann Sexton bio and it took me almost a month of slogging to complete. Ann Sexton is beyond fascinating to me, but there was just something about the writing that didn't grab me. On the other hand, Rough Magic, a Sylvia Plath biography, was an excellent and intriguing read, and I actually dislike Plath for the most part. So for me, a good bio isn't really about the subject, it's about the skill of the writer. Mary S Lovell, author of The Sisters, is skilled at keeping things moving, and not getting too bogged down in the fine details. She's also fantastic at introducing a large cast of secondary -- and even tertiary -- characters, without losing the reader in complex family and social trees.

I likely won't go on and read the letters, however. Published letters hurt my brain more than biographies ever could. I've tried. I've read the letters of authors I love, and I never get more than 100 or so pages in, before I lose all interest.

Mitford sisters: from left, Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity, Pamela 1935
Image from Telegraph.co.uk.

Guardian review of The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
NYT review of The Sisters.

^*There was also a blogger writing about the Mitfords recently, but I read so many blogs these days, I forget which one it was.

I Love You, Katha Pollitt (Reviews of Reviews pt 3)

2008-03-07T12:08:00.007-05:00

Katha Pollitt responds to the flagrant use of controversy to get page views^*, Charlotte Allen's Washington Post piece on how women are just silly bints after all. Of course, the rebuttal was also in the Post, so they're just going to get more page views of out this. However, it's also right that they should publish the rebuttal, and kudos to them for printing a piece that calls the editors out for having published "Women vs. Women" in the first place.

I also just finished reading Learning to Drive this week, so my Pollitt love is out in full force. As I mentioned, the book got a pretty bad review in the New York Times. Now that I've read the book, I can form my rebuttal. The NYT reviewer's problem, it seems, is that Pollitt took a break from writing "brilliant commentary on welfare, abortion, surrogate motherhood, Iraq, gay marriage and health care" and got personal. The reviewer, of course, missing -- or ignoring -- the basic second-wave feminist tenant "the personal is the political" (and Pollitt even talks about this in her book). The personal essays in Learning to Drive are sometimes deeply affecting, especially the essay on her mother's alcoholism (if you only read one thing from this collection, that is the one). These are micro pieces about macro topics: population boom, gentrification, and gender relations are all treated here, with honesty, humour, and compassion. When Pollitt brings her personal "dirty laundry" to the table, the reader can take such large issues and relate them to their own life. Books like Learning to Drive are important books, whether or not you agree with the politics, because one can see how the political can -- and will -- affect them personally.

I see that the author of this review is also the author of something called The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir. Not that there's anything wrong with erotic memoirs, and it's possible that Ms. Bentley is a political person herself. I just feel like she missed the (easily understood) point of a noted political journalist turning the focus onto herself, and perhaps it's due to her own ideas of what a personal book should consist of. That said, I think it's hugely hypocritical to take Pollitt to task for "wav[ing] her dirty laundry" when you've written an erotic memoir. Does the laundry get any dirtier? Odd person.

Interesting that the reviewer of Learning to Drive was female, that the reviewer of The Terror Dream was female^**, and that this blog post started off talking about woman-on-woman misogyny. I'm not so naive as to think that all women need to agree with each other, or bond in some feminist utopia of sisterhood. People have diverging opinions; that will never change. Much as I wish it were so, the whole world is not going to be liberal, socialist, and pro-equality. It does, however, sadden me to see women consciously engaging in this sort of behavior. For a female reviewer to use such terms as "shrill" or "vagina dentata intellectuals" (what?!), or for a woman to write about how all women are just silly dim creatures, really pisses me off. We are all free to disagree with each other, but it feels like such a step backwards to be using such patriarchal devices on ourselves, instead of fighting for better treatment. I know, it's wishful thinking, but I'll keep wishing.

^*And yes, I know I'm just contributing to it by linking here
^**I don't know why it didn't occur to me to just google her at the time

Time Suck Recomendations

2008-02-28T11:02:00.004-05:00

Almost everyone I know has been talking about -- and linking to -- Garfield Minus Garfield. What's just as interesting as the project itself, are people's reactions to it. For some it's just hilarious, while to others, it's poignant and sad. I fall into the latter group, but I suppose I took the author's write up (artist statement?) (too much?) to heart:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor [sic] disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness [sic] and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

I was just introduced to Stuff White People Like today, and I can kiss my productivity goodbye.

White women all consider John Stewart to be the most perfect man on the planet. This is not a debate, it is law.

It's like he knows me!

Finally, Spacing Toronto is a fantastic read. For someone like me who's fascinated by architecture, design, and urban planning, yet doesn't have any real clue about what goes into it, Spacing Toronto is an excellent resource. I'm sure it appeals to those with more of a background in such things as well. Yesterday, their post on the Moorish Revival style gave me answers to the questions that always float in my head when I see this style, and wonder where the heck it came from. Now I can say with authority "Oh, yes, that's Moorish Revival," like I know something about anything. I'll fool them all! Of course, I'll probably wind up saying that about buildings that aren't. I'm awesome that way.

All the above are also now in the "Links! Links! Links!" sidebar.

Two of the three links are CanCon, so the CRTC should be happy.

Thematic: Star Wars Edition

2008-02-27T15:35:00.006-05:00

I have a massive case of the February "Go Fuck Off and Die Already"s.
I want to eat an entire chocolate cake, and I don't even like cake.
I have spent entirely too much time on Youtube today.
So I bring you a theme post.
The image to the left there, is something I made years ago, learning how to use Photoshop. I have no idea why I thought it would be funny to make Ackbar wash socks, and even less idea why it still cracks me up.

Star Wars According to a Three-Year Old

Eddie Izzard: Death Star Cafeteria

Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager

Bonus! Chad Vader sings "Chocolate Rain"

Best of Bootie 2007: Galvanize the Empire (Click to play with Quicktime, or right click and save as).

Han Solo Desk.

Think Geek used to have bookends that were Han and Greedo aiming at each other, but they don't seem to have them anymore. SAD! I always coveted those greatly.

Okay, I'm done. Back to your business, people.

The Deck

2008-02-26T10:04:00.014-05:00

I finished The Devil, the Lovers, and Me: My Life in Tarot a couple weeks back. I couldn't help comparing it to Eat, Pray, Love, with all the new age-y reflections on life, and how one can go about improving one's future.

Kimberlee Auerbach is more down-to-earth than Elizabeth Gilbert, and thus, easier to identify with. The stories in her book weren't funded by a large publisher advance (though she likely got one), and she's not wealthy in the book (even though she comes from, and probably had more money than I do, it doesn't come across that way). Auerbach doesn't go around the world to find herself, she does it in the New York apartment of a tarot card reader^*. Her family is messed up, like most families are, and she's not afraid to talk about it. She's not fabulous, she's an everywoman. And she's deeply funny, and incredibly thoughtful. All this makes Auerbach far more likeable than Gilbert, and makes the book a fast, interesting, and ultimately joyful read.

And yet... Gilbert is the superior writer. Reading The Devil, the Lovers, and Me is like having coffee with a great friend. Eat, Pray, Love transports the reader to exotic locales, where possibilities are open and endless. This, of course, is why Eat, Pray, Love is so successful, both in its writing and in its sales. Gilbert knows how to manipulate the reader, to force you to root for her, to join her on the crazy voyage. Gilbert's character isn't someone I'd easily get behind, in fiction or in life, but it speaks to the excellence of her writing that I did, in each and every page. I fear The Devil... won't have the same success, because it's more mundane.

I have no complaints about Auerbach's writing; I did enjoy the book thoroughly. I think she's got a lot of talent, and further books -- I do hope for more -- should hone that talent into something more magical. That thing that Gilbert has in spades.

* * *

Bookslut makes me laugh:

My favorite of [Penguin’s Great Loves] series is The Eaten Heart: Unlikely Tales of Love by Boccaccio. Boccaccio was an influence on Chaucer. That tells you how smart I feel when I drop Boccaccio’s name in casual conversation. It goes a little like this:
Stranger: Hey, lady, you’re parked in two spots! You suck!
Me: I’m reading Boccaccio! He was an influence on Chaucer!
Stranger: Move your damn car.

Callie Miller at Counterbalance has a post on a chair and ottoman, that also hold your books^**. I guess it's that kind of week.

^**Auerbach admits in her end papers that the tarot reader, and reading, in her book is a composite of tarot readers and readings she's had over the years. No surprise, since it's not likely you'd recount your entire life story over the course of one evening. Makes for an easy transition to screenplay though (oh, I'm such a cynic).
^**$7,000!

Random Nostalgia

2008-02-25T22:37:00.003-05:00

Spacing Montreal has a post on legal postering spaces in Montreal, and a comparison with Calgary's spaces. Interesting stuff, but the part that caught me was the last photo: it's my old C-Train station!

To class, and back home. Downtown. Crossing those tracks to go to the Safeway, or Second Cup, or on my way home from hanging out with that odd little Goth guy at 3 a.m. That photo sent a little shockwave of homesickness through me. Everyday I spend in Toronto -- and every sad trip back to a place that's turning more into everything I ran from -- fills the holes that my past carved in my chest, when I left. Yet there are still things, like random photos of a place that was part of my everyday life, found while link-jumping, that tear those wounds open again. Smaller every time. Some day, it won't hurt at all.