August 9, 2010

Something like a monopoly

“If only one way of infant feeding is permitted to be shown on television, in the moviesm and on social networking sites on the Internet, that way of feeding, becomes something like a monopoly. If women are made to feel anxious about their breasts or ashamed of them, breastfeeding becomes a less likely option for them. Needed information about this way of feeding is effectively blocked in the public media on the false basis of “modesty.” The choice for many is narrowed to which brand of infant formula to buy and what kind of bottle to put it in. Consider, for instance, how the symbol of the bottle has become the metaphor for infant feeding in the public media of cartoons, magazines, children’s books,a nd movies; there is little federal effort to counter the impression that bottle-feeding of artifical milks is better, more reliable, and more socially acceptable than breastfeeding for a human infant.” –from Ina-May’s Guide to Breastfeeding by (everybody’s favourite midwife) Ina-May Gaskin (via Meli-Mello)

From Chapter 16: Creating a Breastfeeding Culture

August 8, 2010

While I was gone…

• My Quill & Quire review of Alissa York’s Fauna is online here. It was such a pleasure to be able to write such an ecstatic review for this wonderful book (whose design is as gorgeous as the story). A celebration of bookishness, and of the animals that have populated our books, and those who hide in the secret corners of our cities. Her Toronto is also stunningly realized.

• And Finn Harvor has asked me to join his “Conversations in the Book Trade”, where I answered some of his questions about the current state of publishing and book culture.

August 8, 2010

Not glad to get home at all

Interestingly, this last week of going along, listening to all the things we couldn’t hear and not bothering turned out to be quite monumental. During our escape to the wilds of The Kawarthas, Harriet learned to walk, learned to dance, and made her first friend, who was called Izzy and is two. (Harriet has other friends, but I have for the most part projected these friendships upon her, whereas Izzy was friended independently. Harriet was totally in love, they hugged each other good-bye at the end of the week.)

Stuart and I spent a week without the internet, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, in particular our games of Scrabble on the porch in the evenings. We were both unsurprised to come home and discover we’d missed not much at all while we were away.

And to my great benefit, Stuart started reading Stieg Larsson en vacance, which meant that for a few days my husband loved reading just as much as I did. This was how I managed to get almost five books read during Harriet’s naptimes (which were made expansive by her running around like a wild animal when out of doors, and thus becoming exhausted). It also led to some book-buying adventures, which I’ll be recounting here in coming days.

It was a wonderful week, everything we wanted and needed, and also full of corn-on-the-cob and fresh peach pie. And no matter how often we swept the floor, there was sand underfoot, and there was sand in the shower, and on the table, and finally throughout the bed, so we were glad to get home and lose the grit. But other than that I really don’t think we were so glad to get home at all.

August 8, 2010

From what I read over the past week

Another literary lost umbrella(!), this time in Barbara Pym’s thoroughly enjoyable A Few Green Leaves: “It was not until she had gone too far along the street to turn back that Emma realised that, possibly in the stress of some obscure emotion, she must have taken Claudia’s umbrella in mistake for her own. And it was an umbrella of inferior quality. She wondered what the possible significance of that could be.”**

(**Update: Upon reading Pym’s autobiography, I learned this was based on an actual incident reported in her notebook, which, I think, constitutes *another* literary lost umbrella)

And then I fell into At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman, my one complaint about being that its lovely cover got a bit manky when I used it to kill a mosquito. “One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights– which in Emerson’s case expired long ago– a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. The greater the work, the wider the ownership, which is why there are such things as criticism, revisionism and Ph.D. dissertations. I will not ask the sage of Concord to rewrite his oration. He will forever retain the right to speak his own words and to mean what he wished to mean, not what I would wish him to mean. But I will retain the right to recast Man Thinking in my mind as Curious People Thinking because time has passed and the tent has grown larger.”

Then I turned to Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (except that my copy is called Thank You All Very Much, which was the title of a film upon which The Millstone was based). “I was not of course treated to that phrase which greets all reluctant married mothers, “I bet you wouldn’t be without her now, so often repeated after the event in the full confidence of nature, because I suppose people feared I might turn on them and say, Yes I certainly would, which would be mutually distressing for questioner and me. And in many ways I thought that I certainly would prefer to be without her, as one might prefer to lack beauty or intelligence or riches, or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about life with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice. So the best one could do was put a good face on it, and to avoid adding to the large and largely discussed number of sad warnings that abounded in the part of the world that I knew.”

Next was Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, which was beautiful and difficult, and uncannily channelling Joan Didion in spots. “‘Blackness’, as [Zora Neale Hurston] understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, “Frenchness” is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one’s arm, but it is no more the total measure of one’s being than an arm is.”

And finally, Darwin’s Bastards, which I’m not finished yet, but how (in particular), I’ve loved short stories by Jessica Grant, Douglas Coupland, Mark Anthony Jarman, Timothy Taylor, and Elyse Friedman.

Such fun. Honestly, my vacation books could not have been more perfectly chosen.