March 1, 2010
Books in Motion #3
Today was a small girl wearing rainboots and riding a scooter that zipped past me on the sidewalk, a hardcover tucked in her brightly coloured basket. I caught up with her at the corner and inquired about the book she was transporting. And it turned out that this was not just any little girl, but a kind of strange one who is irresistible to adults but probably has trouble making friends her own age, and for four blocks she talked to me about the Lemony Snickett series, and how there are thirteen of them, and if I haven’t read them yet, I should. They’re about children whose parents die, and they have a guardian who only wants them for their fortune (and she pronounced “tune” in “fortune” like a song, and she kept saying it over and over.) Though I promised to read them, I probably won’t, but all the same, the little girl was the most delightful person I have encountered ever, like a character out of a book herself.
March 1, 2010
Freedom to Read Week: Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak
I wasn’t planning to observe Freedom To Read Week, but my Toronto Public Library local branch (big ups the Spadina Road massive!) made it particularly easy, with a display table sent up prominently by the check-out. I grabbed Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak, because I knew I’d have time to get through it, and also because I’d never heard of it before.
Now, here’s my confession: I’m not crazy about Where the Wild Things Are. It’s kind of cute, the boy in the wolf-suit, but overwhelmingly benign. (I have not read the Dave Eggers novel, but I’m going to. I have heard many good things about it, and perhaps it might open my mind to the Wild Things‘ depths?). Perhaps part of it is the playfulness of Sendak’s illustrations, as compared to Outside Over There whose pictures are positively sinister.
Apparently Sendak saw Outside Over There as the conclusion to a trilogy with Where the Wild Things Are and The Night Kitchen. (I don’t remember The Night Kitchen. I suspect this should be remedied). These three books, said Sendak, “‘are all variations on the same theme: how children master various feelings – danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy – and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives.”
So I read Outside Over There, and my immediate reaction was, “Ban the thing! Think of the children! The children!” Or at least I could see how one might jump to that response, because the book is utterly mystifying. The pictures are really frightening, the text is weird and jumbled, the story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the whole book is troubling, in the way that so much about it is just not quite right, but exactly why remains elusive. I could not imagine wanting to read this book to a child, I could not imagine wanting this book to be read to me as a child (because truth be told, I always steered pretty clear of anything about goblins).
But on the other hand, if I could have got past the goblins, I could see how these would be pictures to get lost in. The baby is also a terrifically-drawn baby, who is screaming on one page and looks exactly like my daughter. Ida, the girl in the story, is the only illustrated little girl I’ve ever seen who looks like Virginia Woolf. And in the background of the pictures, strange scenes are set that aren’t explained and we’re left to wonder. To wonder too about the story, about Ida who is left to look after her sister while her father is at sea and her mother is (we assume) depressive. “Ida played her wonder horn to rock the baby still– but never watched.” So that the baby is kidnapped by goblins, Ida has to rescue her but makes “a serious mistake” that is never explained. She finds the goblins, all of whom have been transformed into fat babies. Ida only frees her sister by playing a song on her horn that turns the goblin-babies into a dancing stream but left her sister, “cozy in an eggshell, crooning and clapping as a baby should.” She returns home and makes a promise to always watch her sister and her mother, for her father, who “will be home one day.”
Weird weird weird. And how amazing is a picture book that pulls its readers so deep inside it but leaves them only mystified? A story that can’t be tied up neatly, or even properly understood, and must be returned to and considered, and flipped through again and again. Which isn’t to say that the book is necessarily good, or remotely satisfying, but there is something to it, surely. If I could only just begin to put my finger on what it is…
This 1981 NY Times Review of Outside Over There suggests the book has depths I’ve not begun to plumb– complex themes, sexual connotations, that “Mr. Sendak’s illustrations are evocative in so many different ways that for a self-conscious adult mind to enter the world of Outside Over There is to risk becoming paralyzed by the book’s allusiveness.”
According to this resource on challenged books, Outside Over There has been challenged, surprisingly, not for being maddeningly weird, but for references to “nudity, religion and witchcraft.” None of which I’d picked up on– is it possible my mind isn’t sick enough for this sort of thing? I think only the babies are nude, but are not babies often nude? (And now that I’ve started reading objections to banned books, I can’t quite quit. The Lorax “for criminalizing the forestry industry.” Murmel Murmel Murmel for “depict[ing] human reproduction”. And it would be so funny, if it weren’t actually true.
I am so glad that there exist children’s books that are so puzzling and complex and you’re never finished reading them. How much credit does that accord children’s minds, I think, and it’s brilliant. Even if the book troubles me in its vague, weird way– that kind of a reaction from pictures and a couple hundred words of text is really quite remarkable. And I’m even glad that someone wanted to ban this one, because otherwise, I might not ever have read it.
February 26, 2010
In the post and etc.
I just tramped out through the snow to collect today’s brilliant postal haul, which included a writing cheque, my new spaceage autoshare keycard, and a copy of Susan Telfer’s absolutely beautiful collection House Beneath. And really, it tops off the most wonderful morning, which I’ve spent listening to DJ Bookmadam’s playlist, reading An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym and issue 32.3 of Room Magazine. Drinking pear lychee green tea, while Harriet napped for almost two hours (!!). This morning following an evening during which I went out and spent my time in the company of inspiring, amusing women and ate lots of cheese while my husband put the baby to bed without me for the first time ever, and they both did brilliantly. All of which is to say that I am terribly, terribly happy today, and I tell you this not to be smug or rub it in, but because this is one of those good days that I want to collect like a postcard, to pickle away and keep always to remember just how fantastically beautiful the snow-covered world is outside my window right at this moment.
February 26, 2010
The trajectory of a downward spiral
So please, may I draw you the trajectory of a downward spiral? 
It’s when you get The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems out of the library in October, The No-Cry Sleep Solution out of the library in December, and you pick up a used copy of Nighttime Parenting by Doctor Sears come February. This last one signals complete surrender, along with the fact that I bought a bed rail last week.
It’s funny how unwilling I am to give up on my insistence that some book somewhere will contain the answers to our sleep issues. I think this is where desperation can take you. And it’s even funnier, because in no other area of my life would I even consider self-help books, except this one. I scoff at self-help under most circumstances, thoroughly convinced that the truest wisdoms are to be found in fiction. (But aren’t there a dearth of babies in fiction? Real babies, I mean. Literature is rife with narratives about pregnancy, but who would want to read a book about life with an infant? [Though some people have, of course: check out Stephany Aulenback’s Babies in Literature Series at Crooked House]).
The Sears book might be the one that actually works though, because it seems to take most things that we’re doing, things that I worry we’re doing wrong, and then tells me my child will grow up to be maladjusted unless we keep on doing them. And seeing as I am the laziest nighttime parent the world has ever known, we really might be on to something.
(Though Harriet is still moving into her own room this weekend. She does manage to spend about half her night asleep in her crib, and the very best part of her move is that we’ll be able to read in bed again. I can’t wait.)
February 25, 2010
Zoo-ology by Joëlle Jolivet
Really, this was going to be another post featuring Library Books My Child Loves So Much That I Had to Go Out and Buy (which this time was Peek A Little Boo by Sheree Fitch), but that post is going to have to be interrupted by another feature called Other Books I Bought While Out Buying a Copy of that Library Book My Child Loves So Much. (And yes, I think I have a problem).
I cannot be blamed, however, for Zoo-ology by Joëlle Jolivet is absolutely the best book ever. It’s also just knocked Rose MacCauley’s Pleasure of Ruins out of first place for tallest book in the house, and we don’t event have a shelf that will accommodate it. (Oooh! Shall we start an oversized section? What fun!).
I’m taking very seriously the “How to Raise a Naturalist” section in E.O. Wilson’s wonderful book The Creation, and I cannot help but think that Zoo-ology will go a long way toward cultivating a sense of wonder about biodiversity. Each enormous page bursts with vivid animal illustrations (that almost look like lino-cuts), with animals familiar and otherwise. And each double page spread is organized quite magically: “In the trees”, followed by “In the seas.” “At night” and “Black and White”. And there’s “Underground” and “On the seabed”. “Spots and stripes” just might be my very favourite.
Each animal is labelled and the book’s index reveals facts about the creatures: “Harp Seal: 
the young of this species has a beautiful, pure, white coat”. “Fritillary butterfly: The caterpillar of this butterfly feeds on violets”. “Chipmunk: The chipmunk belongs to the squirrel family, but does not live in trees. It lives on the ground, where it hunts for nuts and fruit.”
Oh, the stuff I’ve learned since becoming an avid reader of picture books– for example, I can now name you all the different cars on a freight train. It has been many many years since I was this aware of how much is still left for learning.
February 24, 2010
Enough shameful author appearances for one lifetime
This one author appearance was so remarkable for being shame-free that we had to take a picture
Prologue: Once upon a simpler time, the authors came to you. And though there was probably still queuing, you hardly noticed, because everything was about queuring then. This was elementary school, where the queues were usually single file, and you had to use bring your indoor shoes, and your indoor voices too. Your class would line up in the hall to make the trip down to the library where the author would be waiting. The most wonderful authors– Phoebe Gilman, Robert Munsch, Dennis Lee. There was nothing better than this, except perhaps Book Fairs, and Scholastic orders.
And because you were the bookish kid (it was written in ink, big block letters on your forehead), you were often chosen to stand up in front of the room to be the opening act, to make the author’s introduction. Reading from a mimeographed sheet in your helium-high pitched, impedimented speech, you lisped something about him coming all this way to see you, to read you all some of his stories. How wonderful! Stories with pictures, stories that were guaranteed to be funny because this was author an with an audience to impress, a task was usually accomplished with a joke about burping. And no literary event has ever been less pretentious, more joyful, and so absolutely for the love of story ever since.
Chapter 1 (in a series of shameful author appearances, which are enough for one lifetime): You are seventeen and you are going to meet Margaret Atwood. She is appearing at the Peterborough Public Library as part of an author’s festival, and you want her to sign your copy of The Robber Bride. Unfortunately, this event is taking place on a Saturday and you work on Saturdays. Fortunately, the library is close enough that you can pop over on your break. And so you do. Waiting in the obligatory lineup to have Margaret Atwood sign your book, and you slip her a note in your idiotic handwriting in which you’ve told her that you want to be her when you grow up, because you presume she cares. (And she does enough to mail you a postcard in response not long after, wishing you luck with your writing– points for Margaret Atwood!) . What is shameful about all of this is that at the time, you’re wearing a fuschia McDonalds uniform. Maybe you thought that it would be okay because of how Margaret Atwood once worked at Swiss Chalet and this was solidarity, but as the years go by, you start to think that it probably wasn’t…
Chapter 2: You are twenty three, and Douglas Coupland will be appearing at your local Waterstones reading from Hey Nostradamus. Because you are Canadian and he is too, you look upon this as an old friend coming to visit, and you feel much more familiar with Coupland than you would have otherwise. You count your blessings that you’re not wearing a fast food uniform as you line up for the book signing after his reading (but it must be noted that you’ve moved past McJobs and are now contemplating a vague career under the umbrella of “admin”, which will only be interrupted by a spell abroad teaching ESL in the obligatory fashion). Douglas Coupland is yet another writer who is terribly gracious, or at least well masks his scorn, as you let him know that indeed, you are Canadian, just like he is. Douglas Coupland pretends that this is remarkable, and inscribes the title page with, “To a fellow traveller”, and you feel like a person of substance for being a fellow anything.
Chapter 3: You are lining up to meet Ann-Marie MacDonald at the Lakefield Literary Festival. Though you’ve never managed to get past page 4 of Fall on Your Knees, you found her second novel The Way the Crow Flies absolutely mesmerizing. And you’re dressed properly, no longer suffering from expatriate longings, you think you’re pretty much set for a shame-free author appearance. Until you hand Ann-Marie MacDonald your copy of The Way the Crow Flies, she opens it and you remember that stamped in red in on the inside cover is the message, “THIS BOOK WAS SLIGHTLY DAMAGED IN TRANSIT AND IS NOW BEING SOLD AT A SPECIAL BARGAIN PRICE.”
Chapter 4: Now you’re at Harbourfront, lining up meet the wondrous Zadie Smith, who as given a wonderful reading and just metaphorically sucker-punched some idiots in the Q&A that followed. Funny how all this time waiting in queues for author signings should theoretically give one time to prepare, but it never really does, and you’re always struck dumb when you come face-to-face. Zadie Smith opens up your copy of White Teeth (which, thankfully, wasn’t damaged or sold at a bargain price special or otherwise), reads your name in the top left corner, and tells you she likes it. Zadie Smith likes your name. Unfortunately, the cleverest thing you can think of to say in response is that you like her name too, which is true, but does nothing to push your conversation forward. In fact, it ends just about there.
Chapter 5: You should have learned your lesson, but you haven’t. You’re back at Harbourfront and you’re lining up to get your copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem signed by its author who is currently promoting The Year of Magical Thinking. Once again, all that time waiting does not make you remotely ready when you finally get to the head of the line. You approach Joan Didion who somehow manages to be the smallest person you have ever encountered, the most terrified looking person you’ve ever seen, and the most intimidating. She stares at you without expression. You stare back, probably with an expression, and it’s probably a regrettable one. Neither of you say anything. You hand her your book, and she signs it with a scrawl. You muster the courage to tell her how much you enjoy her work, and she responds with a new expression that can only be described as pained.
Chapter 6: You’ve kept your distance from authors ever since then. Though from afar, you’ve witnessed the most horrifying experiences of all, at literary festivals when authors are seated at the signing tables, patiently waiting and pen in hand, stack of books beside them. And there is no queue. Authors trying to look casual about the whole thing, like they’re not anticipating anything, really. They’re just hanging out, welcoming the break. And you’re almost tempted to jump in line and stop the agony, but you know better now. No amount of authorial suffering will drive you to it, for you’ve had enough shameful author appearances for one lifetime.
(Point of view has been changed from first to second person in order to protect the idiotic).
February 22, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: UPDATE 6
Four down, one to go, and I know lots of other readers are making good progress. Pretty soon I’ll be providing details of the vote we’ll be using to determine which title comes out on top, and I hope you’ll all show support for your favourites.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of reading going on– my husband is eating up How Happy to Be as I type this, and August Bourre had plenty of good things to say about Katrina Onstad’s novel: “Onstad’s send-up of self-important celebrities and the media apparatus that seems structured soley to support their egos is dead-on… and I laughed out loud more than once while Maxime was interviewing Ethan Hawke. It all seems like such a laugh, really, watching Maxime deliberately sabotaging her career, eviscerating her coworkers with her wit, navigating parties and talk shows and fucking Ad Sales out of boredom. And then for a moment it’s all ripped away and we can see the insecurity that underlies it all…”
This week, Charlotte Ashley read Moody Food and found it “engrossing, a genuine page-turner, and uncomfortably evocative of a seriously messed-up time. But so very not my thing.” Buried in Print read it too, found it not exactly up her street, but wrote, “The dialogue is truly stand-out. It’s walk-off-the-page good. Not overly clever, just damn straight and believable. ” Writer Guy reads Century and suspects it’s untoppable: “Ultimately, the real strength of this work is Smith’s assertive and limpid (a word he actually uses at least three times!) prose. There’s a confidence in his style, a writer who’s totally in command of the language.”
In wider Canada Reads news, can I please credit the CBC people for being so cool and supportive about their imitators? For taking it all on as flattery instead of threat? And certainly, there is much flattery– the National Post announced their Canada Also Reads shortlist, which includes Pickle Me This favourites Come Thou, Tortoise and Yellowknife. And having read Julie Forrest’s review, I’m also going to read Stacey-May Fowles’ novel Fear of Fighting (which is available for free download). And then the fantastic KIRBC pepole bring you Civilians Read, which is the CBC Canada Reads lineup, but with a different panel of defenders. And so it will be interesting to see how things go down there.
March promises to be quite the showdown .
February 22, 2010
Can-Reads-Indies #4: How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad
If Max were a man, there would be no debate about whether or not How Happy to Be is a serious novel. But Katrina Onstad’s Max is a woman, and so we have to discuss whether or not this is chick-lit, and if there is such thing as women’s fiction, and my answer to that one would be that sometimes there is, but not now. That if Max were a man, this novel wouldn’t be so different, except for the scene where she gets her period. I think a man reading this novel would appreciate it as much as I have.
If Max were a man, we’d c0mpare this book to Lucky Jim, but because Max is a woman, someone will mention Bridget Jones. She’s more Jim though, because her behaviour is loathsome rather than lovable, but loathsome is made palatable by being funny. (And I got this whole Lucky Jim thing from writer Kate Christensen re. her first novel In The Drink, interviewed here: “…an august tradition of hard-drinking, self-destructive, hilarious anti-heroes beginning with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and continuing through Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and David Gates’s Jernigan, three of the books which have inspired me most. Other exemplars of Loser Lit (and there are many) include The Ginger Man, A Confederacy of Dunces, Bright Lights, Big City, Wonder Boys, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Fine Madness, and, most recently, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-up. I was consciously co-opting a predominantly male genre, another reason I worried that no one would “get” In the Drink.”)
I feel bad now about the fact that I have to undermine this book’s femininity (assuming books have genders, but I’ve got a feeling that they do) in order to demonstrate its value. And you’re probably thinking that I’m protesting too much, but I also know that you’d think I was ludicrous to put this book at the top of my rankings. Why? Because it’s a popular novel, because it’s about a wayward youngish woman who finds love at the end, because it engages with pop culture and media culture, because it’s a comedy, because of the scene in which Max gets her period on a first date, the date has to go out and buy her tampons, he comes back with pads so thick that when she puts one on she waddles.
But in many ways, I truly think How Happy to Be is the best of the Canada Reads Independently books I’ve read yet. First: no gimmicks. Like some critics, I will concede that the Hair Hat Man himself was a gimmick. Century had them too (“Does it matter that there was no Jane Seymour? I don’t think so, but I hope you found her convincing.”) In fact, speaking of Century (and these outlandish comparisons are part of what makes a reading challenge like this so interesting), How Happy to Be also takes on “this murderous century”. It’s similarly woven of stories, of true ones and embellished ones, stories about how we tell stories and why, the stories we tell ourselves, those we can’t bear to, those we tell the world, and those that complete strangers tell us while we’re sitting beside them on the streetcar.
More though, about why this book is so wonderful: Katrina Onstad is a stunning writer. She is. “I watched from windows and trees for seventy-two days until Spring came. Her hair was finally longish, down around her ears now, and she looked beautiful again, her high cheeks neither sunken nor overblown. She could catch me. Day 73, she climbed the same tree from a different angle and grabbed my foot. Terrified, I howled like a stubbed toe and she laughed and laughed and my father brought us lunch to the rotted picnic table with only one bench. We sat in a row, my father, my mother, me, eating sandwiches off paper plates, shoulders touching in the summer, our limbs sighing with relief where they met.”
If How Happy to Be had a gimmick, it would be Onstad’s engagement with reality. The novel is a roman à clef of sorts– no doubt the newspaper where Max writes her film column is The National Post (where Onstad was once film critic); The Other Daily‘s vapid girl columnist seems familiar; Onstad counts Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Aniston, and Nicole Kidman among her characters; her fictional headlines mirror actual ones; she skewers a coke-snorting, bitch-slapping media scene culture that is apparently true to life (not that I’d know, of course, as such culture often takes place after 7pm and I haven’t left my house at such an hour since 2004 and that was just to return an overdue library book).
But the punch of her prose and the push of her plot keeps the trick from wearing thin. Max has spent her life looking on and telling stories from the sidelines, but she’s on the edge of something now– not yet recovered from the end of a long-term relationship which broke with “make or break”; desperately unhappy in her job writing about shitty movies whose advertisements pay for her paper; drinking too much; having stupid sex; she doesn’t have furniture or anything fresh in her fridge. “You have run out of repartee. You think of all the time you wasted watching while you should have been remembering what you once knew: how to start a fire with hands and twigs; how to sleep in a snow cave. You should have surrounded yourself with old people and listened to their tales of survival, really listened instead of jotting them down for later. You have entered your thirties without knowledge and you want it in a pile of sticks, a river, your bones.”
She wants her mother, the mother she lost to cancer years ago. And though she’s too angry with him to know it, she wants her father too, who was so paralyzed by his wife’s death that Max could never reach him. She wants roots, something real, and perhaps she might find it in Theo McArdle, who in his absolute goodness is the opposite of the rest of her whole life.
Rona Maynard was right in her pitch: How Happy to Be is a coming-of-age novel. A bad headline for this would be Catcher in the Wry. And now for the reasons that the novel will not be topping my rankings: first, a fairly conventional plot from about midway in is not extraordinary enough to compare with Hair Hat or Century. And also that the whole point of this novel is Max’s singular vision (“I’m being stabbed to death by my point of view”), which is dealt with most effectively, but (redundant though it is to say) is terribly limited, and doesn’t begin to compare with the other books’ polyhedronal approach.
But I love this book. I think it’s an important book, that it sets a standard that all novels about young women should live up to, that it deals with contemporary urban life in opposition to the Can-Lit standard, that it sets a standard of funny that all novels about anyone should live up to, and that it might surprise any male reader who thinks he’s not so interested in stories about women’s lives.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
3) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad
