June 21, 2011
Where I'm at
Where have I been? For the past week, I’ve been (finally) reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, which is very good because this was one of my new years resolutions. Even better, that I’m enjoying it absolutely, delighting in bits, finding others amusing. Pip has just discovered the identity of his benefactor, and I’m as disgusted as he is at the whole thing in regards to his treatment of Joe Gargery (who I’ve sort of fancied from the start). I have also discovered that I’ve unknowingly modelled my parenting style on Mrs. Pocket, who ignores her children while she lounges and reads, which is pretty much my lifestyle. I’m on page 360 of 536, and still enjoying the ride (and I’m not sure that Dickens creates suspense as much as just making things so incredibly weird, there’s no knowing what happens next [which is kind of something different, no?]).
It’s nice to be reading a long book, and finding the length incidental to the book’s goodness. Though it certainly does cramp my style bit as a person who gets by on reading a lot and writing about it here– I do get impatient as I watch my to-be-read shelf get dusty…
Anyway, the book I’m reading is a battered old paperback whose origins I have no idea of. It was published in 1964, and the spine is bent into a U shape. It has an introduction by someone called Kellogg W. Hunt (and why aren’t more people named Kellogg anymore? Or ever.) The internet seems to be devoid of images of my book’s cover, but in searching for it, I’ve remembered that there exists a modern film adaptation of Great Expectations, and that I’ve even seen it. And that I remember absolutely nothing about the movie, except a scene with explicit oral sex. I don’t think I’ve arrived at that part in the book yet.
June 20, 2011
We love Postal Workers (in principle).
This morning, Harriet and I took a batch of cookies to the locked-out postal workers picketing at the Post Office at Bloor and Spadina. Not because we’re supporters of labour per se (because really, our political leanings tend towards the middle of whatever fence we’re sitting on), but because these are the people who bring us the mail. And admittedly, they don’t always bring the mail so brilliantly– sometimes it takes two weeks to deliver a letter across town, I’ve had packages fail to arrive more times than should ever occur, and my letter-carrier is not the friendliest of women. Which is why it’s hard to wholeheartedly put my support behind Canada Post, particularly as the price of stamps go ever up-up-up, but they’ve got my support anyway because I believe in the spirit of the thing. And because I’m wary of angry people who believe that it’s too much for anyone to ask for a decent job with a living wage, just because they’ve given up hope for such a thing themselves.
I understand these things: that Canada Post continues to be a profitable enterprise, that postal workers’ salaries do not come from taxpayers, but that pension programs are unsustainable. I understand that (from the UK example) that there is argument as to whether mail circulation has in fact fallen, and that the state of privatized mail service (from the Netherlands example) is abysmal to customers and employees. What I don’t understand is this angry reflex of contracting out services being a viable option, which fails to acknowledge the economic drawbacks of a society in which full-time, decent-paying work is impossible to come by. I think workers have to stand up for their rights, and the rest of us ought to stand up alongside them (even those of us who, like the woman who called into Ontario Today last week bemoaning the sea cruises she will never get to take because she doesn’t have a pension at all). Hence the cookies. Solidarity.
I miss the mail. I miss my magazines, and thank-you notes, and wedding invitations, and birthday cards, and paycheques, surprises, presents, books, and even Bell Canada’s emphatic pleas for return of my patronage (though I’m never fooled by that font on the envelope that’s supposed to look like handwriting). I miss going to check for the mail’s arrival, and usually finding something great. I miss the Canada Post vans, which look so lonely in park at the end of my street, and I’d like to see them on the road again. I’ve been getting through these last mail-less week or so by imagining the massive postal backlog bundle that’s going to await me at the end of it all. And I determinedly hope that the woman breaking her back to deliver that bundle to my door managed to succeed in getting what she wanted.
June 19, 2011
Our work in progress
I do have a feeling that happiness is as much about being content with what you’ve got as ensuring that what you’ve got is of extraordinary quality, workmanship, durability– even if it’s not all that much to look at it. Or at least that’s how it’s worked out for us over the last six years, since our beautiful wedding beside the sea and later that night when we danced to Flowers in the Window (which was always about possibility, and it still is, and the song’s still true).
For me, another key to our happiness has been this: we spent April and May ready to spend the summer living on absolutely nothing, and so we instituted severe austerity measures, squirreled our money away, and made the best of things. And then things worked out better than we hoped, and now our usual meagre income feels like extraordinary wealth– we can buy books, and ice cream cones, and I can get my hair cut. This kind of relative thinking does wonders for the perspective. The year we 
moved back to Canada, I was in grad. school, Stuart was in immigration limbo, and we budgeted for $50 a week for groceries from No Frills, and after that year, I promise you, I have never, ever complained about money (or lack of it). Because from these experiences, we learned what enough is, and we’ve been able to tailor our lives accordingly. Mostly because I would hate to think of a life in which books and ice cream were no longer extravagances.
Yesterday, we had the most wonderful day. We had lunch at Dessert Trends, which was amazing because Harriet decided to behave like an adorable toddler instead of a feral creature (or rather she behaved as a creature who eats her lunch instead of one who spits it all over the floor). It was also a good day because I bought the game Bananagrams, a toy accordion, and Olive Kitteridge at a yard sale for $5. After nap time, we walked off our decadent desserts with a walk in the heat to Dufferin Grove Park, which wasn’t hot at all, and Harriet played in the fountains for over an hour, and we sat on a park bench and watched her go. Harriet, the child who wakes up in the morning screaming, “More fun!” and goes 
to bed at night screaming, “More Day!”, and who intermittently screeches, “More water!” in more contexts than you’d ever imagine possible– it was her ideal way to spend an afternoon, and for once she got tired of an activity before having to be dragged away from it screaming, and we managed to talk her out of the swings by bribing her with ice cream. Which we picked up in Little Italy at the street festival, admidst throngs of happy people (only some of whom were drenched in cologne), and then we walked the rest of the way home in the sunshine, Harriet shoeless and sticky, and all of us happy with the way we’d spent our afternoon. Evening involved Mad Men (we’re rewatching Season 1. I still understand why I doubted the show’s goodness then, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong to ever do so). Sunny Saturdays in June are pretty much all a person requires in this life…
I do look forward to June 18 every year, mostly because it’s an excuse to post pictures from my wedding, which was the most wonderful day and everything I ever dreamed of it being (and thank you once again to whoever was responsible for that gorgeous sunshine). It was just 6 years ago, but
we’ve come a long way since then, learning so much and changing our minds about a lot of things, but everything really important I believed in then, I still believe in now (except that James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” was a good song. I do not know what I was thinking). That there is love without compromise (to one’s self, I mean, not between one another), that marriage is a project that you mutually envisage and build up together, and that it’s forever a work-in-progress is wherein lies the beauty and possibility.
June 16, 2011
Introducing Canadian Bookshelf!
For the past few months, I’ve been thrilled to be part of the amazing launching the website Canadian Bookshelf. The site is a work-in-progress, which is pretty wonderful, because it’s fabulous already. It’s the largest-ever online assemblage of Canadian books of all kinds, with author pages and a reader community. A big feature of the site is reading lists, which I’ve had a great time soliciting from writers and hand-picked expert readers (and also writing my own– here is my own list of favourite bookish novels). I’m also pretty happy with the Canadian Bookshelf blog, with guest posts like this one by Anne Perdue, or my new post today on great books for Dads on Father’s Day. To learn a bit more about Canadian Bookshelf, you can read my introductory blog post. And if you’ve got some time to kill, kill away merrily with the Canadian Bookshelf Cover Shuffle.
June 15, 2011
Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe
Second Rising by Catherine M.A. Wiebe appealed to me as the perfect intersection between two books I’ve enjoyed in the past: Alayna Munce’s novel When I Was Young and in My Prime (about a young woman contemplating her grandparents’ decline), and Diane Tye’s food studies book Baking as Biography (which I love, love, loved). Though Second Rising wasn’t immediately resonant with me: the poetic language was hard for me to decipher, and though I worked hard to permeate the metaphors to get to the meaning underneath, I couldn’t find it, and this frustrated me. I persisted, however, mostly because of the evocative way that Wiebe writes about food. I had to shake off the urge to go and bake a loaf of bread, to fill my house with the fresh smell Wiebe recreates with her prose, and partake in the ritual of margarine-slathered heels. She writes about squash soup, and pickles, and ham sandwiches, and it was made me hungry, but also perfectly illustrated the connection between her narrator and her grandmother who are particularly close when the former is small (when therefore, according to the grandmother, the two are particularly close in age).
With the second half of the novel, however, the method of the first became clear to me. I began to understand that the language and metaphors of the first half had been so difficult to understand because they were spoken by the grandmother as she suffered from dementia. These wonderful ideas, this language with so much magic at its root, seemingly, is nonsensical, and yet in preserving it, Wiebe makes it otherwise. She writes about decline not as decline, but as a mode of still-living, with connections and singular moments just like in any life. Her grandmother’s’decline actually reawakens the narrator to the closeness she’d experienced with her grandmother when she herself had just been young, except that it is the narrator, now-grown, who is chief cook in the kitchen while her grandmother sits on the stool and watches. The relationship, however, is complicated by the narrator’s own ambivalence about her relationship with her grandmother, about her own absences while her grandmother was in the final throes of her illness.
This is a different kind of book than others about Alzheimers I’ve encountered– Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles or Michael Ignatieff’s Scar Tissue, both about the early-onset of the disease, would refuse to so give dementia its place, but at the end of a long life, there is poetry to the process of shutting down, the loss is not far removed from a natural process. And yet, Wiebe still addresses the practical matters of the disease– the notes the grandmother leaves, and how she preserves these notes and reuses them so that nobody notices her handwriting’s decline. About what it means when a woman who bakes is not permitted to bake any more, and there is a particularly poignant scene in which the granddaughter contemplates how the disease has altered the dynamic of her grandparents’ relationship.
Second Rising is a book about memories,about memories of memories and what distance does to our stories. And it’s about the role food plays in nurturing our family connections, linking generations as it feeds our bellies and souls.
June 15, 2011
Our Best Book from this week's library haul: Oscar's Half Birthday by Bob Graham
This week, we asked our librarian to recommend books about “alternative” families, because Harriet is obsessed with the construction of family units and we thought now would be a good time to broaden her little mind a bit, so we took out And Tango Makes Three. The librarian also suggested Oscar’s Half-Birthday, whose family construction is fairly standard, but whose urban, hipster, inter-racial parents will help acclimatize Harriet to families way cooler than her own. And happily, these details (along with the urban scenery of abandoned shopping carts and graffiti) are pretty incidental to a lovely story celebrating baby Oscar’s half-birthday, which climaxes with the picnicking population of an entire hillside erupting into song. (The song is also “Happy Birthday”, which is currently Harriet’s favourite, so we liked that too.) My favourite part of the book is big sister Millie, however, with her coat-hanger fairy-wings and green dinosaur puppet– if my daughter is going to have a role model from a book, I’d hope it could be one like this.
Also, the writing is so good. Like this, “…the half-birthday boy, OSCAR, sits tilted at an angle, his fingers curled into Millie’s tuna sandwich. His shoulders are hunched, his head nods, and the light shines through his ears, illuminating them like little lanterns.” Exactly!
June 14, 2011
Mini Reviews: What I've been reading lately
I put Kyran Pittman’s collection of essays Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life on hold at the library after reading the Globe and Mail review of it. I was interested in the book because I’m also a stay-at-home-mom who does not exactly self-define that way, and who feels a bit unsuited to the stereotype, however perfectly happy I am in this life. I also liked the way the author celebrated blogging in this profile. And as I read the book, during the whole of last Sunday when I was sick in bed, I also loved that this is a blogger-turned-author who can really write. (Though she’s got literary pedigree.) It was a wonderful collection of essays, and I particularly enjoyed her reflections of new parenthood from the vantage point of ten years down the line, her sympathetic examination of the attachment-parenting, organic-fooding, toddler-breastfeeding Mama she used to be, fierce in her judgment of others (and herself)– the perspective was refreshing, and illuminating. But the book is about more than that– though I was wary of her “party-girl turned housewife” persona (mainly because I was never a party-girl, and have a natural distrust for anyone prettier than I am), she kept it mostly understated. I loved her piece on raising boys, on her family’s financial struggles and its effect on her marriage, on raising her kids in the American South and the contradictions inherent in their pride in the place, and her own contradictory experience of being a Canadian in America, on her unwillingness to admit where she belonged. It was a great read.
Before that, I’d read Rachel Cusk’s latest novel The Bradshaw Variations. Rachel Cusk is one of my favourite authors, but we have an 
odd relationship, her and I. First, I’m never entirely sure that I’m enjoying her novels until I’ve finished one. Or perhaps I mean that “enjoying” is not what one does with a Rachel Cusk book, which is also the reason I’ve never been able to write a proper review of one either. Instead of being critically attuned to the text, I have to turn myself off and be completely immersed. It is in this way that she’s like Virginia Woolf– you’ve got to let the text take you where it needs to. Sometimes, the prose is so heightened (also like Woolf) that it gets to be too much, but then you realize that realism was never her intention. The story is beside the point, which is annoying, but then this is Rachel Cusk and the point is so so important, never mind the story. Anyway, I loved it, but perhaps I have to. What I don’t have to, however, is to point out that the second-last chapter of this novel is one of the best short-stories I have ever read. Disturbing, dark and hilarious, and absolutely perfectly executed.
The Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney has been sitting on shelf for years. And no wonder– it is a book about the nature of time. Which is not something I’ve ever been moved to pick up, but nor to get rid of either, though I wondered as the dust-jacket became particularly dusty. But I am a girl who came of age on A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Handful of Time etc. And because I’m reading by to-be-reads from A-Z, I’ve made it to the Ds, and it’s time for Dewdney now: the book was wonderful. I rode the subway home from the NMAs on Friday whilst reading about the invention of hours, minutes, and clock faces. I loved the line that we are to time as owls are to air. I loved the paragraphs that were completely indecipherable to me, and then went to say, “And here’s where things get complicated…” Or, “Here’s where things get weird”. And it was all weird, because it’s about physics, wormholes, De Loreans, photography, the telephone, movies, seasons, Toronto, our expanding universe, the past, future and the present. Which is now. No, now. Absolutely ungraspable. As is so much that I encountered in this book, but didn’t worry too much about the details, and therefore just enjoyed the ride. Dust or not, this is a book I’ll be keeping.
June 13, 2011
Wild Libraries I Have Known: West Vancouver Memorial Library
Reader, Editor and Poet Kate Kennedy (who has known a few libraries in her time) tells us about the West Vancouver Memorial Library.
West Vancouver Memorial is my grandmother’s neighbourhood library and she’d often take my sisters and I along to browse when we were in the city visiting. It was significantly larger than our library in Lillooet (about four hours away) and we were always a little floored by the selection. We didn’t have borrowing privileges, but between them my parents usually got down to the coast every few weeks, and if it could be ascertained that the next visit would be before the next due date, we were allowed to take a few books out on Granny’s card. (The possibility of losing or damaging one of these books once you had it home was fairly terrifying.)
It was through these visits that I read most of Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman family series (Homecoming, Dicey’s Song, and the rest). I wouldn’t say there was any real lack of tomboy characters in the fiction I read at that age, but Dicey Tillerman (particularly as depicted on the first-edition cover of Dicey’s Song, next to her boat, in her red sweatshirt) seemed to set the bar a little higher. She wasn’t ignoring her appearance because she’d decided that was the type of person she was, in contrast to, say, the artistic character, the flirty character, the geek and the baseball star. Her mother had abandoned her and her siblings in the parking lot of a grocery store and now Dicey had to take care of them all on their long trip to find other living relatives. Dicey didn’t have time to be a type of anything. I haven’t reread much of the fiction I read back then, but I think there was an authenticity to the high stakes in Voigt’s books that wasn’t so common, and maybe isn’t now either.
Apart from the books themselves, what I loved best about the library in West Vancouver was the pair of rounded, enclosed, 
wood-panelled study carrels up in the adult section. They were reminiscent of hollowed-out trees and illuminated by inviting pot lights, and the thought of having something to study in one of them was pretty thrilling. Then, when I was in grade eight, I got to spend a year living in the city, attending a private school that went in for the full tie and kilt uniform. Having by this time moved into a lot of boarding school literature (Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series and Kit Pearson’s The Daring Game, among others) this was heady stuff for me. I found myself one afternoon at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, in my uniform, with a friend, having nabbed one of the precious study carrels, books spread open before us, watching in confusion as this friend began an elaborate process of removing or obscuring all the recognizable parts of her uniform lest we be spotted by public school students. But we were wearing blazers! With crests! In the world’s best study carrel! What could possibly be wrong?
The ambiance of that library was in part, for me, an extension of the ambiance of Vancouver, a city that was always a treat and that I didn’t want to leave when it was time to go, but that I also never figured out how to fit into properly. I eventually came to love the Interior, and would probably now choose it over the coast, but the coast will always feel a bit decadent, full of things that we didn’t have in our town, the books we had to hurry up to read in time but that we didn’t want to ruin by rushing through.
June 11, 2011
Remarkable things about the NMAs
1) I was pleased to learn that I can be gracious in defeat, though it wasn’t difficult under the circumstances. From Twitter, I gathered that being excited about the National Magazine Awards isn’t cool, but maybe those people get out more than I do. It’s not every Friday night that I get to get dressed up, turn up at a fabulous venue, drink wine, eat delicious, and celebrate Canadian magazines with 600 other well-frocked individuals. It was wonderful. And then, on top of it all, to have my piece on display, to hear my name called and see it up on screen with the other nominees for Personal Journalism– it was completely overwhelming, and more than enough, I thought. And when the winner was announced, and it wasn’t me, I realized that it was really, really was enough, and was happy to remain extraordinarily happy.
2) I was also happy because I spent the evening with Kim Jernigan and Amanda Watkins of The 
New Quarterly, and (seriously) the only disappointment I felt was that I wasn’t able to bring home a prize to them and their magazine, which has always been so good to me. Thanks to them, I never once looked forlorn amidst the hubbub. They were splendid company.
3) Speaking of good company, I was also happy to meet and speak with DB Scott, who was recipient of the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement.
4) I was also amazed to see that my postal phantom was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He also didn’t win, so there is still no confirmation that he exists apart from in the ether.
5) I saw Dani Couture, and Medeine Tribenevicius, met Priscilla Uppal, and Christopher Doda, knew the bartender from high school, and met Joanna from More Magazine who reads my blog (hello, Joanna!).
6) I really only showed up because I was promised a swim in the famous NMA chocolate fountain, but there was no fountain this year– the first discernible evidence I’ve seen that perhaps the magazine industry is dying. The ice cream sandwiches, however, almost made up for the loss. But maybe I just didn’t know what I was missing.
