January 9, 2010

The Girl Who Hated Books

January 8, 2010

A bit overwhelming

“Maybe–“, I said to my husband last evening. And then I couldn’t go on, because to do so would be to put a name to the problem that mustn’t be named (or at least not by me. Husband names it frequently, which is the problem). But I can’t hold it in anymore: “Maybe there are too many books in my life at the moment.” Because it’s gotten a bit overwhelming. Would be less so if I could stop requesting books from the library all the time, and if the Toronto Public Library holdings didn’t contain every one of my heart’s desires. (I am now hold 34 of 161 for Patrick Swayze’s autobiography. Yes, I too am not sure if this is really necessary).

I am currently reading Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen. I’ve also been reading the poetry collection The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan, which is pretty wintry so far, so it feels like the right book for now, though my life hasn’t been very sleeping for a long time. Progress is slow on the Alcott book, which is no matter on one hand because the book is very good, but then I’ve got such a backlog of books waiting. Like the Canada Reads: Independently books, which I’m going to start shortly. Beginning with Ray Smith’s Century, I think, because that is the one I’m most scared of.

And to make up for the dullness of this post, I give you a glimpse of me and technology circa 1987.

January 6, 2010

On my newfound trekker, newfound confidence, and the mystery of defensive mothering

Oh, if I could go back seven months, what a lot of things I’d have to say to the me I was then. I would urge that shattered, messed up girl to, “Get thee to a lactation consultant” a week sooner than I actually did, and advocate better for myself and baby whilst in the hospital, and promise myself that life as we knew it was not gone, gone, gone forever more.

I would also tell myself to run out and buy a Baby Trekker. I know why we didn’t in the first place– I thought Baby Bjorn was the end in baby carriage, but that $150 was too pricey. Since then, I’ve learned that you get your money’s worth, and that Bjorn’s not where it’s at anyway. We’ve had the Trekker for about three weeks now, and I’ve used it every day (it’s snowsuit friendly!), whether to haul Harriet around the neighbourhood, or to cook dinner with her happily strapped to my back (and this has improved our quality of life more than I can ever describe).

If I could go back about six months, I’d tell myself to START PUTTING THE BABY TO BED EARLY. That she doesn’t have “a fussy period between 7:00 and bedtime”, but that she’s screaming for us to put her to bed then. Of course, I wouldn’t have believed myself then, and even once we’d figured it out, it took another six weeks to learn how to actually get it done. This, like everything, was knowledge we had to come to on our own. And most of motherhood is like that, I’ve found, and it seems to be for my friends as well, which is why all my well-meaning, hard-earned advice is really quite useless to them. But even knowing that we have it in us to do so, to figure it out, I mean, is certainly something worth pointing out.

Even more useful than my Trekker, I think, the best piece of baby equipment I’ve acquired lately is confidence. I had reservations with Naomi Stadlen’s book, but she was right about this: “If [the new mother] feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her.” Though it actually was the bookshelves of literature that showed me I could go my own way, mostly due to the contradictory advice by “authorities” in each and every volume. (Oh, and I also read Dreambabies, which made it glaringly obvious that baby expertise is bunk.)

Solid food was the turning point though. I have three baby food cookbooks and they’re all reputable, and each is good in its own way, but they agree on nothing. When to start solids, what solids to start on, and when/how to introduce other foods, and on and on. It was good, actually, because I found that whenever I wanted to feed the baby something, at least one of the books would give me permission to do so. So I decided to throw all the rules out the window, and as teaching Harriet to enjoy food as much as I have the power to do so is important to me, I decided we would make up our own rules. As we’ve no history of food allergies in our families, and Harriet is healthy, we opted not to systematize her eating. We’ve fed her whatever we’ve taken a fancy to feeding her, without rhyme or reason, including blueberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, toast, cheese, beans, chickpeas, smoothies, squash, broccoli, spinach, spaghetti, and cadbury’s chocolate, and she’s devoured it all.

Okay, I lied about the chocolate. But the point is that my instincts told me that this was the best way to feed our baby, what made the most sense, and so I tried it and we’re all still alive. And it was liberating to know that the baby experts could be defied– I really had no idea that was even allowed. That as a mother, there could be something I knew about my child and our family that an entire panel of baby experts didn’t. And we can go onward from there.

What has surprised me, however, is that confidence hasn’t done much to reduce my defensive-mothering. You know, feeling the need to reassert oneself whenever someone makes different choices that you do. How not going back to work, for example, makes me feel like a knob, and moms going back to work feel threatened that I’m not, and we keep having to explain ourselves to the other, in fitful circles that take us nowhere.

It’s not just working vs. not working, of course. It’s everything, and this past while I figured it was my own lack of confidence that was making me so defensive. The best advice I’ve received lately is, “Never be too smug or too despairing, because someone else is doing better and worse than you are.” And it was good to keep in mind that any residual smugness was due to probably due to feelings of inadequacy anyway.

Anyway, it’s not just inadequacy, inferiority. Even the decisions I feel confident about prompt defensiveness when other mothers do differently, and now not because I’m unsure of myself, but because I’m so damn sure of myself that I’m baffled when you don’t see it the way I do. And there’s this line we’re meant to spout in these sorts of situations, to imply a lack of judgement. We’re meant to say, about our choices: “It’s what’s best for our family”, but that’s the most sanctimonious load of crap I’ve ever heard. Some things, yes, like me not going back to work, are best for our family, but other things, the other “choices” we’ve made: I’d prescribe them to everyone, and that not everyone is lining up for my prescriptions drives me absolutely mad.

Mom-on-mom action continues to fascinate, nonetheless. There are politics like nothing else, like nothing in the world of men, I think. It brings out the best and the worst in me, and I don’t think I’m the only one. And I doubt the action is going to be letting up anytime soon.

January 6, 2010

Avocado mishaps and literary avocados

A mishaps during Sunday’s trip to the grocery store led to me bringing home ten avocados when I really only meant to buy one, and so it’s avocado city here these days, as we seek to use them up before they get riper than ripe (read: rotten). Which is sort of easy, because we have a baby, and avocados are nature’s baby food, but even she doesn’t need that much avocado, so we’ve also been indulging in avocado milkshakes, avocado pizza, avocado scones, and my new favourite discovery– avocado bread, which might just be the best thing in the universe. I’ve adapted the recipe as per the reviewer’s comment to add a bit more sugar, and then I forget about the sugar and pretend that this is a healthy treat, because avocado is the good fat, after all.

So the point is that I’m totally obsessed with avocados, and have been thinking about bookish ones. I remembered this piece from the London Review of Books about Californian agriculture and avocado orchards: “Avocados have always been the icon of San Diego’s countryside (which produces much of the US harvest) and if the remaining growers are forced to sell out, the past will become as inaccessible as the future will be combustible.”

In terms of books, there is Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (which I once wrote about here). The famously dirty Wetlands that had an avocado on its cover. We have a picture book called Avocado Baby by John Burningham. I wrote a poem about avocados during my Poetic April back in 2008. Googling, I found this ode to the avocado by Richard Wireck in a literary journal called r.kv.r.y. “O Avocado Avocado”, in which the author asked to be slathered, buried “in God’s sweet, gold pudding, the very butter of paradise.” And YA author called Daniel Pinkwater wrote a book called The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. A further web search brings me to Avocado: Botany, Production and Uses, which sounds a bit boring, and Sex and the Avocado, which sounds less so, until you realize it’s written by the author of 105-Plus Guacamole Dip Recipes.

Which is nowhere near enough. What other literary avocados am I missing? Forgive me for not coming up with more on my own, but I’ve got another loaf to bake.

January 5, 2010

L.M. Montgomery and The Blythes are Quoted

My Quill & Quire review of Jane Urquhart’s Extraordinary Canadians: LM Montgomery and Montgomery’s The Blythes are Quoted (edited by Benjamin Lefebvre) is now posted online. I enjoyed both of these books immensely, and found The Blythes are Quoted fascinating to consider as a example of Montgomery’s work in progress, though perhaps not a typical one as this book has something of a peculiar genesis. And the Urquhart biography is wonderful– as enlightening as Mary Rubio’s but in an accessible package for a more casual read. There is so much about Montgomery her readers don’t know, and how much richer is her writing once they do.

Anyway, my review is here.

January 5, 2010

Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly

As I received this book for Christmas and read it over a couple of days of bookish holiday bliss, my brain is far too mushy in regards to it for a formal review, but I don’t want to miss my chance to let you know how wonderful it is. I read Karen Connelly’s novel The Lizard Cage in 2007, it’s stayed with me ever since, and it made a Burma a place that’s important in my mind. I certainly thought of Teza as I read news coverage of the Saffron Revolution later that year (which was not really a revolution in the end, but for a while it was the promise of something). Connelly’s novel was formidable in and of itself, but that a Canadian woman had managed to so well articulate the story of a male Burmese political prisoner was quite remarkable.

Connelly’s new book Burmese Lessons is partly the story of how she came to write The Lizard Cage. I say “partly”, because Burmese Lessons is “about” many things, strands of experience from that time in Connelly’s life, plaited together in a gorgeous construction. The book is subtitled “A Love Story”, and much of it is the story of Connelly’s love affair with Maung, a Burmese dissident guerrilla fighter. But theirs is not the only “love story”, strictly speaking. In the book, Connelly writes of her effusive love for the whole world, this one country in particular, and every corner of it, and its language and its people, and its beauty, and she seeks an understanding of its ugliness too. Her passion resonates throughout the text, whether she is describing the people she sees, the food she eats, those she conflicts with, the politics of Burma, the situation on the Thai-Burmese border, or sex with Maung (and there is much of the last one). Burmese Lessons is very much a story of the body, of sex, of violence she witnesses inflicted upon Burmese protesters, of the sick children she sees who are dying of malaria, of her own experience with malaria, of living in the jungle and not having a bowel movement for days and days and days. Connelly holds nothing back here, and her passion is clear with every line.

As well as a novelist, Connelly is a poet and a non-fiction writer, and her prose demonstrates such deftness. After more than a decade dealing with Burmese politics, she also knows her stuff, and holds nothing back either regarding the brutality of the Burmese junta, the realities of life in the Burmese refugee camps in Thailand, and the violence that human beings enact toward one another. This is not an easy book by any means, but its various strands are entwined so as to counter heavy with light, to enlighten and enliven, to make reading the whole thing in a day or two a serious delight.

If you haven’t read The Lizard Cage, you really should. And then when you’re finished with that, read this to find out everything else, what Connelly couldn’t hope to contain in her other book. Which is to say that Burmese Lessons is a serving of leftovers of a sort, but it would have been a sin to have them go to waste.

January 4, 2010

My Canada Reads: Independently Reactions

First, I’m glad my excitement has been a little contagious, or maybe this books list is just really good, because I’ve received a fantastic response to the Canada Reads: Independently lineup. I’m pleased that quite a few readers will be reading along with some or all of the picks, and I look forward to comparing responses.

I’m pretty pleased with the range of books we’ve got here. Of course, the list is stacked with books by men called Ray, but that’s just par for the course, isn’t it? Men not called Ray are always excluded from this sort of thing. I’ve only read one book from the list before (How Happy to Be) but I read it for fun and didn’t review it, so to look at it a bit more critically will be a different experience. It is worth noting, of course, that my “celebrity panelists” are all friends of mine in some capacity, but I figured, who better than friends to ask for a favour? And finally, that the panel is entirely constructed of bookish people, which was quite deliberate, for the same reason I don’t get my hair cut at the dentist.

We’re friends of Biblioasis here at Pickle Me This (and friends of friends of Biblioasis), so it’s not a big surprise that they’ve got two books on the list. Dan Wells is the publisher of Biblioasis and he’s championing his own book, which might constitute a conflict of interest, but I decided that was fine. For really, what is more of a conflict of interest than loving a book, and isn’t that the very point? If Dan liked Century enough to publish it, isn’t that just another way of him saying that he really likes it a lot?

Being the Canada Reads Indies, we bent the rules to our heart’s content. Dan touts his own book, Patricia Storms brings a book of stories to the table, and Rona Maynard’s book I’ve already read. Happily, happily, anything goes, and I think the list is better for it.

My aim is to get through these by March, to post reviews on my site as I read them, to rate the books against one another, and then the week after Canada Reads is broadcast in March to reflect on these books in relation to one another, and to other peoples’ reaction to them.

Should you wish to read along, go here for details on purchasing Hair Hat, and the other books are available on Amazon or your local independent bookstore. And how nice to suppose that I won’t be reading so independently after all.

January 1, 2010

THE LINEUP (Canada Reads 2010: Independently)

My gang of celebity panelists and their excellent picks below, in alphabetical order by panelist. I am very excited about every single one of these books, and I hope my excitement gets a little contagious.

The Champion: Steven W. Beattie

Steven W. Beattie is review editor at Quill & Quire, and administrator of the literary site That Shakespearean Rag.

The Book: Moody Food, by Ray Robertson

Rock and roll novels are difficult to pull off. It’s hard to capture on the page the unkempt spirit of the music – its energy, its anarchy, its ethereal, emotional immediacy. Which makes Moody Food, an extended booze- and drug-fuelled odyssey into Toronto’s Yorkville (and beyond) in the 1960s, a fairly stunning achievement. The novel tells the story of Bill Hansen, an employee at the Making Waves used bookstore, who meets an itinerant musician named Thomas Graham, an American transplant decked out in a “white cowboy boots and a red silk shirt, all topped off with a white jacket covered with a green sequined pot plant, a couple of sparkling acid cubes, and a pair of woman’s breasts.” Graham (a figure loosely based on the real-life ’60s rocker Gram Parsons) enlists Bill and his girlfriend, Christine, to join him on his idealistic quest to create what he calls “Interstellar North American Music.”

First published in 2003, the novel is many things: a modern retelling of The Great Gatsby; a vividly realized portrait of Yorkville in the 1960s; and a metaphor for the disillusionment of the generation that came of age pursuing a heady mix of peace, love, and marijuana smoke. Robertson has said, “I believe that no matter what artistic pursuits you have, you want to be regarded like a rock star.” Ambitious and ultimately highly moving, Moody Food is that rarest of all beasts: a great rock and roll novel.

The Champion: Rona Maynard

The first book that captured Rona Maynard’s imagination was I Can Fly by Margaret Wise Brown. The most recent was The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. In between, she has edited Chatelaine, written the memoir My Mother’s Daughter and contributed to the anthology Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Reveal the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother. She speaks across the country on the life-changing lessons she’s learned from difficult people, and blogs at ronamaynard.com. She believes that no one is ever too old to be enchanted by timeless words read aloud.

The Book: How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad

Ever since Katrina Onstad’s debut novel How Happy to Be kept me immersed throughout a cross-country flight in economy class, I’ve been urging friends to discover this neglected millennial spin on the mother of all stories, coming of age. Not that the jacket copy mentions that term. The adjectives scream modernity—hip, ironic, sardonic, sassy—as if the publisher doesn’t trust the Jaded Generation to give a snarky tweet for a young woman’s fumbling and belated struggle to start living like a grownup instead of a resentful kid.

Onstad’s journalist heroine, Maxime, is on the face of it a princess of irony—a pop culture maven with a perpetual hangover and an unsparing eye for the foibles of stars whose self-important pronouncements sell The Daily, “a paper so right that Hitler would have made the commute.” About to turn 35 and still partying like a commitment-phobe at frosh week, Max embodies the studied brittleness of a culture in flight from reflection and responsibility. She’s way too smart not to know it. A frequent guest on TV roundtables about the manufactured topic du jour, she sums up her requests this way: “Swing music is back, could you take an anti-swing stance? What do you think of Gap greeters? Is sex the new virginity? Virginity the new modesty?”

A former film critic for The National Post (speaking of right-wing papers), Onstad limns Max’s workaday world with deft comic flourishes that capture the navel-gazing nuttiness that’s now being packaged as news by aging hipsters in thrall to trivia. But there’s a lot more at work here than spot-on satire. Max’s studied cynicism conceals the fear and bone-deep loneliness of the still-unparented child she is at heart—daughter of a mother who died way too young and a feckless hippy father in constant retreat from his own grief. Among the many rewards of this incisive novel is the unsparing light it shines on baby boomers, whose own brand of narcissism paved the way for their children’s obsession with glossy nothings.

Max’s eloquently portrayed frustration with her trendy pastiche of a life makes her a poignant and compelling character. She knows exactly what she doesn’t want—the same old same old. But what can she embrace with her whole being? And does she dare take the risk? That’s the unspoken question posed by the return of an old boyfriend who would never fit in at a celebrity press conference. Max’s triumph—and Onstad’s—is that she makes the leap, and you root for her all the way. The best stories never do go out of style.

The
Champion: Melanie Owen

Melanie Owen is a writer, editor and social media consultant living in Calgary, Alberta. Recently most of her days are spent chasing after her toddler daughter and drinking too much tea but she does manage to get some reading and writing done every day. She has an unhealthy obsession with collecting the New Canadian Library paperbacks that were published in late 1960s/early 1970s in an array of garish colours – and has since started a blog about reading her way through them: www.roughingitinthebooks.com

Melanie can also be found at www.meli-mello.com

The Book: Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

I told myself I wasn’t going to pick a New Canadian Library book for this but, lets be honest, what else have I been reading these days? Besides, I keep buying this book for people so obviously I love it and feel that if called upon to defend it I would be able to do so. I’ll be honest – this isn’t a happy book (no great NCL books are in my opinion) but it is good. I find that most people haven’t heard about this book or Martha Ostenso and they both deserve a lot more recognition. Published in 1925 this one takes into question the prudish morality of the day and is very much steeped in what was considered the Canadian realist literary attitude. There is a lot of – what I like to call – “nature going on”, meaning: talking about nature/weather in a metaphorical sense – no Can Lit classic could be without that. But it also seems to me that is must have been interesting time for women to write say what they wanted to say without being shunned too much. Lind Archer, the lead character, is definitely an independent woman trying to hold on to some of her independence while still living acceptably in the small community around her. Apparently Ostenso wrote the novel in six weeks for a novel writing contest and it is said that she wrote it with her married English Professor lover – who later left his family to be with her – and so maybe she wasn’t so interested in what the morality of the day was? Either way, it is a fantastic read and will stick in your mind for a long time.

The Champion: Patricia Storms

Patricia Storms is an award-winning cartoonist, as well as an illustrator and author of picture books and humorous gift books. She was the artist for the 2008 TD Summer Reading Club, and recently traveled to Nunavut as an author/illustrator for the 2009 TD Canadian Children’s Book Week. Her newest picture book, ‘The Pirate and the Penguin’, was published September 2009 by Owlkids Books. “Wonderfully expressive faces, hyperbolic cartoons and the occasional use of speech bubbles combine to make the illustrations both quirky and fun”, writes Kirkus Reviews. Patricia lives and creates in Toronto, with her husband Guy and two fat cats.

The Book: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder:

Perhaps it’s unfair to pit a collection of short stories against a list of novels, but I couldn’t help myself – I am so smitten with Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat, it simply had to be my ‘Canada Reads 2010: Independently’ pick. The eleven stories in Snyder’s debut collection are charming, quirky, mysterious, and Snyder’s wry prose is sharp and spare. The teenager describing the adults who surround her at a summer barbeque: I hated them all, exquisitely. Or the young girl agonizing over her humiliation: I knew what my face looked like at that moment, the mouth in a stupid O, and I wished I could undo it and throw that face away. Tales of seemingly ordinary lives, subtly revealed to be discomforting and dark, are all delicately linked by a strange, mysterious man whose hair resembles a hat. People in these stories have secrets, are unhappy, unsettled, and it is the presence of the Hair Hat Man, like the lone stranger in a small Western town, who wakes them from their clouded slumber. In the story ‘Comfort’ the woman who finds the Hair Hat Man at her front door thinks to herself, “His presence, his hair hat, were uncalled for, an accident, a misfortune, a blemish on an otherwise clean, calculated day that should have held nothing but the ordinary reminders and warnings.” At first just a passing, quirky description, the Hair Hat Man moves closer into focus as the stories progress, until finally becoming fully formed in the second last story, ‘Missing’. Things are not always what they appear to be, people misunderstand, and are misunderstood; they lie to themselves and to others. The Hair Hat Man knows this only too well: “More people should be themselves; the world would be a different place.”

The Champion: Dan Wells

Dan Wells is a bookseller, publisher, editor, bookbinder and generally useless fellow who lives with his wife Alexis and two boys in Belle River, Ontario.

The Book: Century by Ray Smith

Ray Smith’s Century is one of the most important and neglected novels in our literature. First published in 1984 by Stoddart, it was immediately still-born, as the acquiring editor left the press and there remained no one to champion it. Books such as Century require a champion: if the Canada Reads institution – and surely it is, by now, an institution – worked, it would be books by the likes of Ray Smith, and not by already commercially successful writers such as Ann Marie MacDonald, which would get a bit of the limelight. The best thing about something like Canada Reads is the sense of discovery. But I digress…

Biblioasis re-released Century earlier this year as part of our Renditions Reprint series. Charles Foran wrote the introduction to
the novel, arguing it is among the greatest works of Canadian literature yet produced. Beyond a bit of word-of-mouth excitement on Twitter, no one but Steven Beattie over at the Shakespearian Rag took any notice at all. Beattie wrote, in part,that: “… the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners.”

Ray Smith has been at the literary forefront in this country since the 60’s, and I think it’s shameful that so few people know who he is. His Cape Breton is The Thought Control Centre of Canada, along with Sheila Watson’s Double Hook, heralded the introduction of the Canadian postmodern. His Lord Nelson’s Tavern — which we’ll re-release as part of our Ray Smith Reclamation project — raised the ante considerably. And Century blew everything open: it’s as if Musil or Walser or Mann immigrated to Canada. It’s an intensely moral, beautiful, horrifying, fearless novel. (If it is, indeed, even a novel. There are those out there who see it as a collection of stories.)

I’ll leave you with the last words of Foran’s intro: Ray Smith was, and still is, an artist of great seriousness and, I sometimes think, greater sadness still. Nearly a quarter century after its publication — that word again! — CENTURY continues to stand alone in Canadian Literature, apparently too singular, strange and unclassifiable. Out of this sad truth comes a happy one: the book remains to be discovered. Here it is.