April 19, 2010
The fundamental need for narrative
My friend Alex pointed my attention toward Gene Weingarten’s article “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?”, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. It’s a brutal piece, and I’m not sure I’d “recommend” it, because these kinds of stories are traumatic even to read about. But it’s a stellar piece of journalism, and pinpointed an idea that fascinates me, that has so much to do with story:
“Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”
April 18, 2010
The Motherverse
One day last August, I reported the following: “Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all. (I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now.)” And I’m happy to finally be able to report that it’s amazing. These days we’re on our third round of “Baby Time” at the library, I’m getting a reputation as “the mom who knows all the songs“, andI suspect that reputation might be way less awesome than I think it is.
I find it remarkable, the way that every mother claims she can’t identify with the mothers she encounters at Mommy/Baby groups. The way that every mother claims to be an outsider in this baby-centric maternity-leave no-males-in-the-daytime universe we all inhabit– can every single one of us really be all that unique?
Of course, I am that unique. My daughter never even had a Sophie, and I only made one friend at Baby & Me Yoga (and she was picked out of the crowd due to her pants’ lack of a lululemon insignia). My daughter is now old enough that when I hear new(er) moms’ conversation, I roll my eyes in boredom (and NO. Your child is not teething at three months. I don’t care what the book says. He just drools a lot). I am tired of learning your baby’s name (which is usually something like Jaydence), his age, but never, ever learning your name. (And I also hate you because Jaydence sleeps through the night, but that is another story).
Venturing out to the world of other-moms has been more like grade seven than any experience I’ve had since then. Everybody always seems to be friends already, better at applying make-up, they’re thinner than I am and they have better clothes. And that they’re not that interested in being my friend is usually due less to the fact that they’re mean and stuck up and has a great deal more to do with me being a loser. That I’m “the mom who knows all the songs”, and moreover, I’m proud of it. I’m the one totally rocking out to Skinnamarink– what can I possibly expect?
I love the songs though. I have become obsessed with nursery rhymes since Harriet was born, and recite them on command. I’m a regular fount of bouncing rhymes, and tickling games. Baby Time is one of the highlights of my week, so I can’t help but get a little enthusiastic. And it’s strange to now be one of the moms who chases her mobile child across the circle– the first time we went to Baby Time, Harriet was two months old, and she spent most of the program asleep in my arms. We have come a long, long way since then. (And I’ve actually met some very nice moms in the interim. How wonderful is it always, that spark, that moment of connection, when someone stands apart from the rest, and you’ve no doubt that you’ve just found a new friend?)
Harriet will be eleven months old next week, and she’s never been more amazing. The last few days we’ve gotten a great idea of how much she actually understands– if we say, “Please?” she’ll hand us an object. If we ask her to wave (without gesturing), she’ll oblige us. Perhaps because we don’t have a TV, she is obsessed with books in lieu of the usual television remote control, usually whatever one I’m reading and she’ll climb over anything to get her hands on. Once she gets her hands on it, she often doesn’t rip it. She has four teeth, so much hair, the most gorgeous smile I’ve ever seen, and a little poking-out belly. She thinks I’m hilarious, though her love for me is a bit much in the evenings when she cries if I leave the room. She loves swimming lessons. Her daddy can make her laugh like no one else can, hysterically, and it’s my favourite sound in the world. She loves the swings, though she cries when we take her out of them. She even likes Miffy! She’s amazed by mobiles, windchimes, and she loves to suck on the bottom of shoes. She continues to be an appalling sleeper, though we had two weeks off from that and it was blissful. I tried to tell her that I’m a way better Mommy when she sleeps well at night, but Harriet wasn’t having any of it. Harriet yields to no one.
I often hear women saying, “I love being a Mom,” which I’ve never been able to bring myself to say, and sometimes I feel bad about that. Though I think it would be a bit like saying, “I love having arms”, and really, what’s the point? What I do love is Harriet though, and having her in our family, and in her near-eleven-months old phase in particular, because she’s so much fun. She’s the whole reason I wanted to have a baby, and it’s been so brilliant these last few months to be reminded of what that reason was in the first place.
April 17, 2010
Short Cuts: Poetry by Dani Couture and Laisha Rosnau
If book design was the best thing about Dani Couture’s first collection Good Meat, this would still be a collection worth reading, and happily, the poetry is even better than it looks. Couture’s collection has an unabashedly carnivorous theme– butchers, hunters, pumping hearts, frying bacon, fleshy girls, beef on a platter, and an exploding whale. Gaping wounds, gutted fish, Taiwanese mystery meat and the powers of e. coli. Couture is working with concrete, fundamental matter that refers back to home, to nostalgia, to childhood and stories from the past, “lessons learned from the country”. Her work is not raw (which I use here not as a pun, but raw is a reflex when discussing gutsy work like this) as much as medium rare– these poems are sculpted, worked-on, crafted. The imagery is as sharp as the knives that flash through them. “my ordinary words fall/ around my feet like tired poets/ tumbling from open windows.” “she says good meat comes/ from the sky– pulled down with lead/ shot aimed just right”
****
Laisha Rosnau’s wonderful second collection Lousy Explorers takes as its epigraph the final stanza of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water”: “But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper/ And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper/In an elementary world;/There is something down there and you want it told.” Her poems are about women who are sinking, who have left one place for another, who have embarked upon new journeys and new lives in ways that are subtle or otherwise. The 1970s suburban mother who “sent a few things flying in the kitchen”; the girl who leaves at eighteen, “foam mattress tied with rope, box of books”; girls on the frontiers of suburban childhood– creeks, the clotheslines, and hedgerows; the woman who loses her husband after sixty-years of marriage; women turning into wives, going from one place to another, and the things they take with them. Turning into mothers too, burgeoning life beneath the surface, and this is connected to nature as well in ways that are affirming and alarming (“Winter Driving, Third Trimester”). The places these women go to in their minds: “Lousy explorers, we make a mess/ of things, strip and exploit, squint blindly at stars”. And the amazing ways that they move forward all the same.
***
Dani Couture reads from her new collection Sweet at Seen Reading.
Laisha Rosnau’s Lousy Explorers shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
April 17, 2010
Poetic April Newsflash
Due to so much poetry, and the amazing constraints of April, Pickle Me This’ Poetic April Celebrations will be extending into May. Hooray!
April 16, 2010
New blogs…
Writer Mark Sampson (who is one half of the amazing Rosenblum/Sampson team, and one of the nicest people ever) has been blogging about his reading experiences at Free Range Reading. Mark is an incredibly generous, open-minded reader with plenty of smart insights. And I don’t just like his blog because he likes all the writers I like, but that might be part of it…
And then there’s Birds and Words, whose writer is fascinating– she’s a writer, an “almost-birder”, she knows more languages than I have fingers (and I’ve got the requisite number of those), and her blog is funny, strange, whimsical and well-crafted.
I’m also really enjoying Torontoist: Books, who could teach the major news outlets a thing or two. They could!
April 15, 2010
Unremarkable Underpants
“Your mommy hates housework, Your daddy hates housework, I hate housework too. And when you grow up, so will you. Because even if the soap or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach, That you use is the very best one, Housework is just no fun.” -Sheldon Harnick (from Free to Be, You and Me)
It has come to my attention that I’ve been mistaken about the label of domestic fiction. This came to my attention when I read Ian McEwen’s Solar, and noticed once again that he’s one of the few male authors whose fiction lives up to the standard set by woman writers (and I write that tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I mean it. My bias is showing.) He totally writes domestic fiction! When I emailed Steven W. Beattie with this outlandish statement, however, he politely set me straight– McEwen writes “psychological fiction” (and what that means exactly [if anything] is something to ponder for another day).
So this is what I’d always considered domestic fiction: stories about how people live and/or work together, the details of ordinary lives, how family members relate (or don’t), stories about parents and children, and what people eat for lunch, and sex for the 1500th time, and the birth of the third child, and what’s in the bedside drawer, and on the shelves in the pantry, and how you get to work, and whether the car is clean or dirty, and if there are balled up kleenexes in the pockets that keeping going through the wash, and who spills what at the breakfast table, and what kind of rug is on the living room floor, and the shower curtain pattern, and unremarkable underpants, what goes on in that room called “the study”, and who gets power of attorney? Sibling rivalry, all things Oedipal, they fuck you up your mom and dad, and marsha, marsha, marsha. And then some. Oh, and babies.
By my definition, Lionel Shriver writes domestic fiction. Carol Shields did it better than anyone. Alice Munro, and Margaret Drabble, and Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs. Jonathan Franzen. AS Byatt, most recently in The Children’s Book. Siri Hustvedt in What I Loved. Anne Enright. Everything I’ve ever read by Lisa Moore. John Updike (at least in the one book of his I’ve read, which was Too Far To Go. John Irving. Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse. Rachel Cusk. Rebecca Rosenblum in her stories about Theo and Rae. Margaret Lawrence, particularly in my favourite of hers The Fire Dwellers. And Ian McEwen, at least in Solar, Saturday and A Child in Time.
Basically, if the book was like a peek through a golden window that hadn’t had its curtains drawn, I thought it was domestic fiction. But what if I was wrong? What if I’ve been broadcasting myself as a domestic fiction devotee all this time, but I’ve really meant something different? What if I’ve been mis-applying this label willy-nilly and now everyone thinks I’m an idiot who refuses to read anything not written by Bonnie Burnard. And yes, her The Good House was domestic fiction as I see it, but one might consider that book a very-lesser To the Lighthouse, no? By which I mean, it hardly sets the standard.
I worry that my very gendered approach to reading has also been influenced by this mis-labelling, that I see my domestic fiction as a woman’s domain and a writer like McEwen as the exception, but perhaps things aren’t as divided as I suppose? And how wonderful it would be to suppose such a thing as that. Perhaps it’s time for a re-evaluation (and maybe even not just on my part).
April 14, 2010
The tea came from the East
“Mrs. Pigheights, without responding, raised the cup to her lips and was, as one sometimes is in moments of distress, delighted by the brief voyage along the inside of her throat. The tea came from the East and bore her away to the East, the East as it had been dreamed of and conquered by the British Empire, inlaid with saffron, sand, and multicoloured servants. The imagination holds in reserve a multitude of emergency exits. Always remember that, Lucie.” –from The Breakwater House by Pacale Quiviger, trans. Lazer Lederhandler
April 14, 2010
When life gives you lemon juice
(the content of this post is taken from the bottle of ReaLemon ® Lemon Juice From Concentrate in my refrigerator door. It goes very well with the first barbeque of the season, which happens to be chicken burgers from the amazing Good Food For All cookbook).
3 1/4 cups of water, 1/2 cup of ReaLemon ®, 1/2 cup of sugar. Combine ingredients. Stir until sugar dissolves. Serve over ice.
April 13, 2010
The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley
Does poetry have the same male/female divide that fiction may or may not have (and how you feel about this depends how you feel about ghettos)? Can I also confess here that I’ve not approached any male poets to take part in Poetic April because I’m afraid of male poets? In the blogosphere at least, male poets always seem to be having public feuds whose origins I can never decipher, but it’s usually something theoretical. And maybe it’s just the poets I gravitate to who, like most writers I gravitate to, are usually female, but their work is largely accessible in a way that Kyle Buckley’s (or Michael Lista’s too) is not. This is all just a sweeping generalization based upon a tiny sample group, but I will be expanding the sample group over the next few weeks and I’ll see how it goes. (I’m also going to be reading Erín Moure soon, which I expect will change my mind about everything).
Anyway, my way of access into Kyle Buckley’s The Laundromat Essay was by having heard him read last year as part of the Pivot series, and his work was so fresh, jarring, funny and absurd that I bought the book. Reading the book, however, did not come with the same ease that listening to it had. The work is still fresh, jarring, funny and absurd, but it’s hard. The key, I think, is to read as you would listen– pay attention to the sounds of the words, let the poems float over you, to let the atoms fall where they may. Like any poet, Buckley paints a picture, but his is abstract, its meaning subject to interpretation, and neither meaning nor interpretation is really quite the point (so perhaps I should stop trying to wrap my head around the idea of a book as “a blindfolded staircase”).
But in a way, wrapping my head aroud that idea is the point, that Buckley uses imagery and language in ways that challenge expectations. That the imagery and language aren’t more than the sum of their parts, or rather than they needn’t be. Here is a surface worth skimming for a long while before contemplating what’s going on underneath it, and in places (I think?) the surface might just be impenetrable. It put me in mind of John Ashbery meets Samuel Beckett.
The work itself is not impenetrable though. Buckley’s book is built around a narrative essay about a young man arguing for after-hours access to the laundromat to fetch his clothes. The laundromat owner is more interested in the whereabouts of his son, who is called Hoopy. Their conversation goes in circles, and the young man is recounting all of this to the person he is waiting for, the person he requires clothes for. His narrative is footnoted by references to poetic fragments that go some way toward illuminating his situation. “By this point, I very nearly love you. Which means that I love you with, I don’t know, all of the intensity of a thousand brilliant suburban porch lights.” And some times the fragmants don’t illuminate much at all, but the recurring words and ideas serve to drive the work forward, and I’m fasinated, however baffled.
And just writing all this here has been somewhat terrifying, because I don’t really understand what Buckley is up to, and I probably don’t understand many of the references that would explain it. It is intimidating to write about something that seems so beyond me, but I’ve written anyway (ever careful to profess no authority) because this is a book worth writing about (as it’s worth reading, and worthy of discussion). Poetry really does need to be brought into the wider world, which is from where (the reading) I found this book in the first place, and now that I’ve read it, I am very glad I did.
