May 24, 2008
Epizoodic
From Bryson’s Diction for Writers and Editors:
Epidemic. Strictly speaking, only people can suffer an epidemic (the word means “in or among people”). An outbreak of disease among animals is epizootic.
May 23, 2008
A Nice Cup of Tea
My first tea ceremony took place in a crooked Tudor house in the English Midlands, a sign outside indicating which seventeen century king had once stayed there. The tea was simple, Cream Tea, pursued mostly for the sake of scones and jam. Made with PG Tips pyramid bags, the tea steaming in its pot and too hot yet to drink so I prepared my scone– spread the Devonshire cream thickly, topped it all with a dollop of jam.
Such an initiation into Englishness was not at all lavish, would even have been austere if not for the jam and cream indulgence. But it was a sacred ritual undeniably, every element essential, from the currents in my scone to the teacup’s rattle in its saucer. To the reverence bestowed on that steaming pot of brew, steeped to perfection. Poured to be admired: a nice cup of tea.
Tea in England is remarkable for its permeation into ordinary life. While I lived there, I studied the soaps and I soon learned “I’ll put the kettle on” would be the first response in any crisis. I’ve always loved the news stories of power surges following pivotal episodes of Coronation Street or EastEnders, Britons rising from their sofas to put their kettles on at the very same time.
I was pleased, however, upon marrying an English man and becoming part of his family, to gain a view onto Englishness beyond the television’s. And though the soaps’ depiction of ordinary life turned out not always to have been accurate, the tea thing was spot on.
At my in-laws’, we partook in the tea ceremony eight to ten times a day. Without ornamentation, of course (scones and jam are special occasions), but the steaming pot stayed fundamental. Each day was constructed around its tea breaks, a cup taken with meals and then to follow them. Tea was the bedrock of our everyday, plus a pick-me-up in a pinch (“I’ll tell you what you need right now— how about a nice cup of tea?”).
When my husband and I moved to Japan a couple of years later, I was only vaguely aware of the Japanese tea ceremony, a thousand year-old tradition rooted in Zen Buddhism that is, like so much of the culture, hard to explain. Practitioners enroll at Tea Schools and study for years to become proficient both in the actual preparation of the tea and in the ceremony itself. They must also study calligraphy, flower-arrangement, the art of wearing a kimono, among other things.
As tea lovers, we were both interested in Japanese tea and with great enthusiasm, we’d soon prepared our own ceremony. Purchasing a round Japanese teapot and a big bag of green tea leaves, and of course we knew how to brew it— pouring on the leaves (we do like our tea strong), adding boiling water, and we waited for it to steep.
When the time came, we poured our tea into mugs and sipped, not even tentatively. The bitterness was troubling but, trying for cultural sensitivity, we ignored it. And even after we realized the tea made us sick to our stomachs, we continued to make it. Reminding ourselves of the health benefits, that we’d get used to the taste, and as Japan was where we lived now, stiff upper lips would be maintained.
My Japanese tea experiences were an initiation into Japaneseness only as much as they affirmed that I’d never really belong there. Affirming that we were outsiders, for otherwise wouldn’t we have known that green tea is to be prepared weak, with water past boiling to avoid bitterness? We should have let the tea steep for just a minute or two, consuming it in small quantities— in cups more like thimbles than our cocoa mugs.
This was all properly demonstrated when we attended an actual tea ceremony. Kneeling on the tatami mats in our proper places as guests, with our host dressed in a kimono, her quiet demeanour setting the tone. She purified the tea bowl with a special cloth, added green tea powder and then hot water, and stirred it with a bamboo whisk. No scones, we received a small sweet instead, the colour of cherry blossoms and made with pounded rice. We bowed as we received our tea.
But when I say that we didn’t belong in Japan, I don’t mean that it didn’t become home to us. As in the tea ceremony, the two of us were guests taking part in a ritual we would never fully understand, but it was our everyday life for a while. That it couldn’t have gone on forever doesn’t mean we miss it any less.
In Canada, where we live now, our tea ceremonies continue. We put the kettle on first thing in the morning, and it’s the first thing we do upon arriving home at the end of the day. We can do caffeinated or herbal, and we now know how to make green tea delicious. Our ultimate indulgence is High Tea at a posh hotel downtown, but we save these occasions for fear of spoiling ourselves.
And tea at our house is certainly not without its own charms— I can whip up a batch of scones in twenty minutes, and we eat them with jam made from strawberries we picked last summer. The tea brewing in our little white teapot, the very centre of our household.
Tea remains a sacred ritual, undeniably— the world stopping for pleasures we’ve come to know by heart. Linking our past and present, the places we’ve been to how far we’ve come. A delectable definition of home.
May 22, 2008
An attentive reader
“It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of the language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meaning in the book that can’t be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don’t understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism– clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information. Facts… just the surfaces of things.” –Paul Auster, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
May 21, 2008
Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers
I decided I had to read Why Women Should Rule the World after I heard Dee Dee Myers interviewed on CBC’s The Current last month. Her intelligence and experience made a remarkable impression, but it was her optimism that was so inspiring. Coupled with the absolute sensibility of her message: that empowering women is good for everybody. The title is provocative but Myers means it, defining world-ruling as “[taking] advantage of all that each of us has to offer.”
This book’s strength is its fusion of disparate ideas to form a comprehensive whole– so refreshing. Part of it is the politically sensitive nature of Myers’ material– she’s doing a lot of elaborate sidesteps on the way towards her arguments, in order not to be read as in attack mode.
But more than sidestepping, Myers articulates her ideas well beyond polemics. Part of this is her book’s hybrid nature: part memoir, part treatise. She is able to illustrate her own experiences in politics, the ways in which being a woman hindered her own advancement– as White House Press secretary she was given more responsibility than authority, which seems to be a typical story; how she was told, when she protested a subordinate colleague being paid a higher salary, that he had a family to support; the struggle to be likable in authority, which men are rarely faced with. Myers worked as Press Secretary in the Clinton White House for two years, worked in writing and television afterwards, and then got married and had a family.
She writes, “That’s my story, but…” The “but” being key, that hers is not the only choice. “Women want and deserve not only the flexibility to manage work (and family) from day to day, but also the ability to make choices that allow them to pursue their goals across a lifetime.” Her focus remains on power, however, because “[a]ssuming that women– even women with children– don’t want the top jobs means that too many women will never get the chance to make those important decisions for themselves.”
Myers’ reality is complex, and she asserts that women need to accept and support women whose choices are different from their own. She thinks of herself as a feminist, but from watching her son and her daughter she’s certain– “[it] isn’t nature or nurture: It’s both.” She acknowledges aggressive tendencies inherent in men in particular, but realizes these inherited traits aren’t our destiny. Dealing with the example of Margaret Thatcher: that it is too much to expect one woman to change everything, and surely her position altered the world’s opinion of what women were capable of.
That different can be equal: “That doesn’t mean that every man should be expected to behave one way, nor every woman another. Rather it means that women’s ideas and opinions and experiences should be taken as seriously as men’s– regardless of whether they conform to traditional stereotypes.”
Through her own experiences, statistics, and interviews with other women, Myers illustrates the various ways women can be systemically excluded from power. Showing that this is dangerous, not just in principal, but in terms of economics: she shows women as “the engine driving economic growth worldwide,” and not just with their immense consumer power, as she cites studies showing that Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards have significantly higher returns on equity, sales and invested capital.
Myers explains that men and women experience the world differently, and she demonstrates how traits typical to women, such as negotiation skills and collaborative strengths, can be highly effective in business. Moreover that women’s own lives are strong training grounds for management experience– motherhood in particular. She cites examples of women playing key roles in peace processes around the world. That in achieving “critical mass”– wherein women are not token, but a strong enough force to actually make a difference– everybody wins.
Myers is not overtly prescriptive– the general nature of her arguments ensures her book’s relevance is wide. Surely different institutions must find their own way towards solution, by Myers’s book is undeniable impetus for them to do so. I would like to think a man would read this, and find it as fascinating as I did– and not get defensive. That women could cease slinging internecine arrows for a little while, and understand that ganging up on each other is part of a game we don’t have to keep playing. The world can be better.
“This isn’t what I think,” writes Myers. “It’s what I know.”
May 21, 2008
New books
New books! On the weekend I got Stunt by Claudia Dey, and The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (ed. Vendela Vida). Now reading In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill. Have just come down with an obsessive need to acquire a copy of The Summer of My Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews.
May 21, 2008
Free to Be…
I went to see Free To Be You… And Me this weekend, performed by kids at The Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts. I’d never seen the show live before, I don’t think, though I’d watched the movie plenty of times in elementary school, and I think there was a book, and I had the record too. But of course there was much that I’d forgotten, and it surprised me too how relevant the material still is– which is nice, that it can still be enjoyed, but too bad too, that the message is more necessary than it’s ever been. Of course it’s simplified– I see now that simply giving William a doll and feeding tender sweet young things to the tigers was never going to change the world. The show is a product of a different way of thinking, but still, it lays down a terribly substantial foundation. I’ve always adored it, and was thrilled to discover most of the movie is available online. Check out Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack singing “When We Grow Up” (a video that is only the smallest bit creepy). And Marlo Thomas driving a taxi in “Parents Are People” was always my favourite.
May 19, 2008
Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña
I chose Shari Lapeña’s Things Go Flying by its cover, and the novel didn’t disappoint. Though I chose it for its first line too, “Harold’s recent hobby of reading obituaries at breakfast was his only new hobby in years.” Setting the stage for an off-kilter story, irreverent and fun. Also as lovely and delightful as the cover suggests.
Things Go Flying is the story of a family at a point of crisis: Harold Walker becoming preoccupied with death and acting strangely, his wife Audrey ambivalent about losing control of her household as Harold breaks down. Their teenage sons doing teenage things. Also Harold is being visited by spirits, and, well, Audrey’s got a troubling secret of her own.
Lapeña’s narrative is dizzying at first, rapidly flipping between the four members of the Walker family. Which gets easier as the book goes on, but also serves to emphasize the radically different spheres each character inhabits, how far apart they are. Harold Walker is the common man we’ve encountered in books before– in Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, or Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party, for example. An ordinary guy finds himself in some extraordinary trouble, though Harold’s trouble is even more extraordinary than usual. His wife Audrey, however, is decidedly novel in her creation– the overbearing wife and mother, killing herself with martyrdom and the very best intentions, but here so fabulously drawn on the inside and out.
Between Harold and Audrey, and their sons, Lapeña demonstrates the variety of ways in which family members drive one another crazy. Her story engaging in all its twists and turns, and, though undoubtedly fun and amusing throughout, it all comes to take on a deeper resonance.
May 19, 2008
All questions
Post the brilliant The Dud Avocado, I’ve got no answers but all questions over in my post “Encounters with Books: And the trouble(?) with comic heroines”, now up at the Descant blog.
May 19, 2008
Good news
My good news of today is that my short story “On a Picnic” will be appearing in the Fall issue of The New Quarterly. TNQ is an amazing magazine, and I feel so lucky to be included.
May 19, 2008
Sally J.
I continue to be obsessed with Fine Lines by Lizzie Skurnick, but my obsession was mammoth this week as she reread Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is one of my favourite books ever. I last read it when I was 24, and enjoyed it more than I ever had. It’s a fascinating book, which I’ve forever linked with Ann Marie McDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies in terms of point of view, dramatic tension, and certain thematic concerns. Sally J. certainly meets my requirement for children’s books worthy of adult rereads: that it becomes a whole new book when you encounter it again, this change providing elusive insight into your childhood perspective. In this book especially, Judy Blume writes from way way up over her readers’ heads, and they end up constructing her world in the same misconstrued (and wonderful) way they approach their own.
I am also excited because Lizzie Skurnick is writing about The Girl With the Silver Eyes next week. I used to love this book, in hope that pharmaceutical-induced mysticism was the key to my social ostracism but alas, my eyes were brown. Further excitement: that Skurnick promises Norma Klein to come (and it is common knowledge that we love Norma Klein here at Pickle Me This).
