May 11, 2011

Mini Review: All the Little Living Things by Wallace Stegner

I was so conscious of the fiction’s construction in Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, but only because I was so amazed that Stegner had constructed something so realized. How had he done it? And it’s not often a reader can ask these kinds of questions and not be pulled out of the story, but the spell was never broken here. Stegner pulls of other impossibilities: a story about the land and environment as a symbol, but the literal facts of the land (and those who inhabit it) are never minimized for this; a sad, sad story so invested with hope, and love; a masculine book full of senses and emotion; a book firmly set in its time but which does not feel remotely dated fifty years later.

All the Little Live Things is the story of the Allstons, a couple who, after the death of their son, escapes the world by building their own little Eden, a paradise in the California wilderness, though the world creeps in– poison oak, gophers, snakes and rotten neighbours. A young man begins camping out on their property, embodying the spirit of 1960s’ youth rebellion (and having a passing resemblance to the couple’s late son). The Allstons befriend a neighbouring woman who they discover is both pregnant and dying of cancer, the competing forces within her body a microcosm for forces at play in the community, and society at large.

It’s a heavy book, but a brilliant, absorbing read, with wonderful moments of humour and insight. Wonderfully plot-driven as well– Stegner certainly does a fantastic ominous. He’s was a masterful writer who doesn’t receive a lot of credit these days, and I’m so grateful to have discovered him.

May 10, 2011

Making progress

I am making no progress with my to-be-read shelf, mostly because I keep buying new books and getting others from the library. (For example, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, which I’m going to be reading shortly). While there are books on the shelf that have been sitting there for years, and that I have every intention of reading but just haven’t had the inclination to do so. (And please do not mention all the unread (to me) books that my husband has read, and have therefore left the shelf and blended into our collection, fooling me into think I have less unread than I really do).

So I have alphabetized these books, and will go through them one by one, so please do forgive me if my reading tastes seem a bit random and/or alphabetical in the coming weeks. It is my pleasure that Caroline Adderson’s Pleased to Meet You is at the front of the pack, mostly because I’ve been saving it anyway as a treat. And that Rachel Cusk’s latest novel follows not too far along. And if I stay on track, I may finally read Great Expectations and Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney, or else I’ll just give up on books entirely out of fear of being conquered by D.

May 10, 2011

Spring Things

Spring things: first pie of the season (strawberry), High Park hanami beneath the sakura, and the flowers on Harriet and my matching aprons, which were a home-made (!) Mothers Day gift from my mom.

May 10, 2011

California, on the page

I am currently reading Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, which was given to me by the singular Julia. I’d previously only heard of Wallace Stegner House in Eastend Saskatchewan, and only because I know Eastend through Sharon Butala. Anyway, through the book I’m discovering that Stegner was a magificent writer, so masculine but in the most unlimiting, wonderful way. And how he writes of place, here California in particular, which I only know through literature, save for our one week to San Francisco in 2008 (and I’ve learned that San Francisco is not so much California anyway).

California, whose geography I know through the poetry of Brian Wilson, and Jan and Dean. And through the prose of Joan Didion, a land of dams and aquafiers, a desert by the ocean with a mountain range. And the stucco houses in Los Angeles, which I know from Weetzie Bat, and The Peculiar Sadness of the Lemon Cake, and Meghan Daum’s latest book. Not to mention 90210 and Melrose Place.  Such a literary land– Cannery Row, and that sign that said Robert Louis Stevenson had lived there for six months some year in the 19th century. And yes, Jack Kerouac Way.

May 9, 2011

The connection between reading and real estate

“If there was anything wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library–no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage; no broken sets of Dostoevski and George Eliot; no Galsworthy, even; no Barrie and no Bennett. This was the chief concern of the Village Council during Marcie’s term. The library partisans were mostly newcomers to the village; the opposition whip was Mrs. Selfredge… She took the position that a library belonged in that category of public service that might make Shady Hill attractive to a development. This was not blind prejudice. Carsen Park, the next village, had let a development inside its boundaries, with disastrous results to the people already living there. Their taxes had been doubled, their schools had been ruined. That there was any connection between reading and real estate was disputed by the partisans of the library, until a horrible murder–three murders, in fact–took place in one of the cheese-box houses in the Carsen Park development, and the library project was buried with its victims.” –John Cheever, from “The Trouble with Marcie Flint”

May 8, 2011

Mothers are people

Before I had a baby, I thought the song “Parents are People” from Free to be You and Me was about the wide range of employment opportunities available to men and women everywhere in this brave new world– that some mommies drive taxis and sing on TV, and daddies play cello or sail on the sea. And then I had a little baby and for a while (in retrospect, a very little while, but at the time I didn’t know this) my entire self was erased, and it dawned on me that the song was about how parenthood doesn’t have to constitute the entirety of a parent’s identity (though I’ve got no qualms about those for whom it does. Parenthood is a noble and worthwhile calling).

Lately I’ve been extending my thoughts on the song and imagining it in terms of a mathematical equation though. (This is the kind of thing that occupies my mind as I push a stroller down the sidewalk looking kind of vacant.) If Mommies=People [with children], therefore People=?  The logical answer is that People are People, but even Depeche Mode didn’t manage to get to the bottom of that matter. Indeed, why should it be that you and I should get along so awfully? But it does clear up the matter of why mothers can’t seem to get it together and support each other. Because mothers are people, and people just don’t do that.

Case in point, the story in the Toronto Star this week: “These moms refuse to wear sweats”, which makes the argument that motherhood doesn’t mean we have to stop wearing skinny jeans and motorcycle boots. My initial response is “ugh” for many reasons, chief among them being that I never looked that nice even before I had a child, and also because I don’t have the money, figure or talent to ever look like the skinny jeans moms do.

But I realize that these women are fighting the same mommy stereotypes that I grapple with. “Motherhood doesn’t have to mean sweat pants, baggy tops and bad perms” so the article goes, which is analogous to my own crusade, which is “Motherhood doesn’t have to mean being an idiot”. I’m not sure who exactly are these mythical frumpy idiotic mothers we’re all running from, unless we’re all running from the very worst fears we harbour of ourselves. And these selves are so various, and we’re all running so hard that it starts to look like we’re running from each other, but we’re not.

Or perhaps what I mean is that we’re not mothers divided as much as people with children who never had all that much in common in the first place.

I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be out of the first year or so of motherhood. Those months when everything is so urgent, so terrifying, and so unsure that you just cling to something that may be true in order to make sense of a chaotic universe. On top of the practical matters of new motherhood was how threatened I was by other mothers and their choices. I was told that this would lessen as I became more assured, and it’s true. I think we all muddle through, and there’s no one way to do it, and that families are people as much as mommies are, and people are.

(I also think that that Tina Fey’s Fuck You to breastfeeding in her book Bossypants should be required reading for anyone who gets upset at the sight of formula fed babies. And I think that anyone who finds breastfeeding evangelicals offensive should consider the innumerable ways that breastfeeding mothers are only superficially supported in our society. And then should go read the Tina Fey chapter and feel better about everything.)

Lately I’ve noticed my failure to find my place in the mom dichotomy. Either I should be always putting my children’s need first (this rarely happens. Harriet is a fairly robust human being, and therefore under normal circumstances, her needs are pretty much on par with my own) or taking time for myself and having a manicure (which has never happened. Because it is very difficult to read and have a manicure, or so I imagine. See notes above about me being frumpy). The great thing about this lack of inclusion, however, is that I don’t have be involved in the mom dichotomy at all. Because, well, mommies are people with children, and people are…

And in such open endedness lies liberation and infinite possibility.

There is a book called The Happiest Mom that I’ve been eager to get my hands upon, most because, like all the best parenting books, it might validate all the choices I have already made. (Also, if you’re newish to this blog, read Dream Babies by Christine Hrdyment, which will teach you that all baby/parenting books are faddish fluff, and you are your own best parenting expert if only you have the confidence to believe it). I love the idea of a book suggesting that happy motherhood is possible (it is!) and that there’s a way to get there (and there are many!).

For me, the way to get there has involved a husband who’s as good a mother as I am, a life that gives me plenty of time to myself, and not having another child anytime soon because I think it would probably break me. An individual path, but it works for me, and so I feel so lucky to be celebrating my second Mothers’ Day (or my third, if we count the Mothers Day I spent having an external cephalic version).

First, because we had a lovely evening with own mom. And because my husband and daughter gave me a basil plant and license to run wild in the bookstore this afternoon (I got I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue, and The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk, whose novels I can’t get enough of). They also accompanied me on A Pro-Choice Jane’s Walk around downtown Toronto today in the glorious sunshine, which is fitting because my own reproductive freedom is part of why I get to be a happy mother.

I’m so grateful for the choices I’ve been able to make on the road to here.

May 5, 2011

The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe

A few years ago, I read Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s exceptional novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and realized that I had to read Chinua Achebe. And so I read Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease (the latter at the same time that I was reading its near-contemporary Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Allan Sillitoe, and strange connections between the two were illuminating) and enjoyed the books for both their literary value and the opportunity to read about Africa from the perspective of an African. Or rather, as in the case of Adichie too, more specifically, Nigeria from the perspective of a Nigerian.

My book club read Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah last month, and I thought it would be a good segue into his most recent book, the essay collection The Education of a British-Protected Child which had been sitting on my shelf for a while. And it was a good segue, or more accurately, the essay collection was a wonderful complement to Anthills…, which had been much more challenging than I’d been prepared for.

The Education of a British Child collects essays and addresses by Achebe from over the last 30 years, about his life, his work, and his politics. For Achebe, all three are intertwined, and have their roots in his origins. Nigeria was a British colony until 1960, and so until then, Achebe’s passport had distinguished him, like all Nigerians, as a “British Protected Person”. It was a strange kind of protection though, and Achebe’s feelings towards colonialism and post-colonialism are explored in most of these pieces. What I found most interesting about his perspective is that he writes from “the middle ground”, which he explains is:

.. neither the origin of things nor the last things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of hte unpredicable, or irony.

So that while Achebe’s feelings about colonialism and its horrendous effects are never measured, neither is any situation so simplified that colonialism is the easy answer to any hard questions about Africa’s present and its past. Achebe writes about the strange position of being an African writing in English, but doesn’t necessarily see the English language as part of the colonial yoke, and notes that English was readily by adopted by Nigerians as a unifying language. Or that he can learn as much from his great-uncle, a traditional leader in his community, as he can from his father, who was a Christian schooled by missionaries, and that both father and uncle “formulated the dialectic which I inherited”. Which is, of course, the capacity to acknowledge the world as a complicated place.

Achebe’s essays are funny, engaging, and where points between them overlap it serves to underline the general effect of the book rather than detract from it. Though it’s much less funny that Achebe has been making the same points for 30 years, that so little has changed– about how Western readers understand African (and Achebe makes a spectacularly impassioned case against Joseph Conrad, over and over), how we have to read Africa through Africa’s eyes, about the legacies of colonialism (and here Anthills of Savannah became so much clear to me– that African didn’t squander a democratic inheritance from its colonizers, Achebe describing the British colonial administration instead as “a fairly naked dictatorship” so what it wrought it unsurprising). He writes about the connection between Africa’s population, and the African-American population, about the history of Africa and Africans, which is so much different from how the colonizers told it in order to justify their actions.

The final essay “Africa is People” begins with Achebe sitting in on a meeting of economists on the state of Africa, during which the prescription for Africa’s problems was generally removing food subsidies and devaluing currency. Suddenly, Achebe takes to the floor with the realization that he was sitting in on a fiction workshop. “Here you are,” he says to the economists, “spinning your fine theories to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories”. Except that Africa was not a laboratory, and Africa was people, and surely they wouldn’t permit these same perilous economic experiments upon the citizens of their own countries?

My copy of this book is now full of underlinings, but I’ll conclude here with what I think is one of the powerful in this marvelous collection, displaying Achebe’s grace, sensitivity, erudition and ease with language:

“Like the unfortunate young man in my novel, the poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne’er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are great than their badge of suffering, because they are human.”

May 3, 2011

Wild libraries I have known: Lillian H. Smith (TPL Branch)

Believe it or not, the history of the Lillian H. Smith Library stretches way back to even before it was a wild library I had known. (The following information is courtesy of the library’s website.) The library opened in 1922 as the “Boys and Girls House”, and was the first library in the British Empire devoted exclusively to children’s literature. In 1995, the Boys and Girls House closed, opening a few months later as the Lillian H. Smith branch in its current location at the corner of Huron and College Streets. Lillian H. Smith had been head librarian of the children’s library from its inception, and had a fascinating career as a children’s librarian and champion of librarianship (which you can learn more about at this website devoted to Smith, to her work, and to the history of the Boys and Girls House).

My own history with the Lillian H. Smith Library begins only last fall, though I had been there a few times previously to see exhibitions at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. But I became a regular patron once Harriet had outgrown the Spadina Road Branch‘s baby program, and we were directed to Lillian Smith for their Monday Toddler Time. I was doubtful anything could replace Spadina Road in my heart, and truly, nothing ever could, but Lillian Smith comes awfully close. Because there’s a gryphon at the door, and a light fixture inside that hangs down over four stories, and we get to ride an elevator when we go there, down to the big room with the stars on the door. Which is significant because there are stars on the door, but also because there’s a door at all, which means that Harriet and her toddler comrades can run around in circles without danger of escaping, and we all partake in a half our of great stories, songs and games led by Joanne Schwartz (whose new book City Numbers is launching next week at Type Books).

Lillian Smith also holds a special place in heart, because it has the largest selection of children’s books I’ve ever laid eyes upon. We stick to the west side of the building where the picture books are, but I’ve run after Harriet through the east side enough times that I’m familiar with the chapter books too (paperbacks on spinning racks, which remind me of my library youth). On the picture book side, we always check out the selections on the featured book shelves to get our mitts on brand new books so crisp their spines haven’t even cracked yet (and/or their flaps haven’t even been ripped).

But I also love the breadth of a collection that has been growing for 90 years (and still has the old “Boys and Girls House” stamps on the inside). I used to think that vintage children’s books were only fun for hipster parents, but Harriet proved me wrong with her love of Marjorie Flack’s Angus books, Virginia Lee Burton’s Choo Choo, Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings, Curious George, Madeleine, and old-school Dr. Seuss (The Smeetches, and current obsession McElligott’s Pool).

Plus new-school obsessions: we LOVE Charlie & Lola, anything by Mo Willems, Marthe Jocelyn, Marisabina Russo, Ruth Ohi, Sheree Fitch, Mem Fox, Shirley Hughes, and Marie Louise Gay. Etc. etc. Because there are shelves and shelves to love. And I absolutely love that we can visit Lillian H. Smith so regularly, and the collection will never be exhausted– there is always something new to discover.

This library is just one of the reasons we’re so happy to live where we do.

May 2, 2011

One good thing about today

One good thing about today was that my essay “Love is a Let-Down” was nominated for a National Magazine Award for “Personal Journalism”, which is wonderful. This is the little essay that really could… (and now I really have to publish something new and excellent just to prove it wasn’t a fluke). So pleased The New Quarterly saw its worth last year, and gave it a home in its pages. I’m also looking forward to having it appear (edited into an altogether different kind of creature, but still a useful one) in Readers’ Digest next month.

The New Quarterly is all sold out of their issue 116, but it’s available here in digital form through Magazines Canada (and at a very reasonable price as well). You’ll be able to read the abridged version in RD too, but I urge you to get a copy of the original if you’re interested.

May 1, 2011

The Common Reader

I really enjoyed the essay Narcissus Regards a Novel, about how readers read to be entertained, about how there is no longer cultural authority, media doesn’t shape taste but simply reflects it, good is what makes us feel good, what affirms our ideas about who we are. I particularly liked the last half of the essay, which posits that perhaps there still exists some readers in possession of that “strange mixture of humility and confidence” that allows the invitation of influence, the possibility of second thoughts. (I believe this was called “flip-flopping” in the 2004 American presidential election.) Irresoluteness is not commonly regarded as a virtue in our society, though I actually find it kind of attractive. Mark Edmundson, the essay’s author, thinks so too, and he thinks we’re all out there waiting for the right works to deliver us from our Narcissism:  “… the truly common reader—this impossible, possible man or woman who is both confident and humble, both ready to change and skeptical of all easy remedies”.

And this is not a yes, but. If anything it’s a yes yes yes yes yes!, but, because I love the idea of the moveable reader, and of reading as the antidote to a society of prescriptive consumerism, but the beginning of the essay still rankles me. Because while our reluctance to judge the value of artistic works has certainly lowered the cultural tone, the alternative is even more disgusting (and I think of Parley Burns in Elizabeth Hay’s new novel: “What a ranking, comparing, depressing mind he had.”) I think of literary critic William Arthur Deacon who was also obsessed with determining what was great and what wasn’t, and how history has determined he was wrong, wrong, wrong. (I hope he knew it too, somewhere in his heart, before he died a painful, lonely death. He was a horrid man.) Who gets to be the decider? I’m not saying that everything I love is brilliant, but some of it is, and critics would still leave it out of the canon.

The beginning of the essay also gets me, because I wonder about anyone to tell me how I read, why I read, let alone how I should read. I do desire to be Edmundson’s elusive common reader, but so what if I didn’t? Who is he to tell me how I should be? Or what literature should do, as though books ever only do just one thing (and if they do, please don’t let it be to “be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.” I hate the violence of that image, and my sea isn’t even frozen).

I was thinking about this even before I read this essay, as I rode the subway on Tuesday evening and watched the woman across the train from me reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She was coming home from a job that required her to wear attire that didn’t suit her, which I knew because her casual/sporty jacket did not go with her skirt and nylons. Over her nylons, she was wearing socks and running shoes, which meant her daytime footwear didn’t suit her physical needs either. It was 6:45, which is late to be commuting downtown, and I thought, “Wow, you can have your book. You don’t get to pick your own clothes, or your schedule, so surely I’ll grant you your book.” I thought, “Office lady in the running shoes. You read whatever you damn well please.”

I am lucky that I can afford to be elitist, because I don’t want to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and because I once tried to read The Da Vinci Code, but I thought it seemed long and more than a bit boring. I am also lucky because I get to spend a lot of my life doing creative, fulfilling things, but I think that kind of life can put one more than a bit out of touch with reality. And so I do like to check my snobbery from time to time, and stay irresolute about most things, such as what’s great and what isn’t, and who’s allowed to tell who to read what and what for.