June 7, 2012
Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know
From an excellent post by Laurel Snyder on the dangers of turning on to chapter books too soon:
“Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know.
The marriage of images and text is partly to blame for this, I think. Something about the collaborative process too, perhaps—an artist and a writer challenging each other, with a common purpose but different modes. But I want to believe that the main reason picture books can be so different is that kids are so different.
At the tender age when kids first encounter picture books they are open, accepting, free-thinking. A two year old doesn’t really expect anything when she picks up a book, and so a book for a two year old can be anything. Physical comedy. Visual art. A puzzle. Books for kids can pop-up or scratch-and-sniff. They can be meta-fiction. They can speak multiple languages or intertwine multiple distinct storylines. There are almost no rules to picture books. Kids scribble in them, build forts with them. Picture books are experiential on every level you can imagine, and some you can’t.
They’re awesome.”
June 7, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy Part 2: Myrl Coulter and Helen Potrebenko
Last week, I read Myrl Coulter’s The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, a memoir of Coulter’s experiences growing up in Winnipeg and being forced to give up her son for adoption in 1968 when she finds herself pregnant. Like Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which I enjoyed so much, Coulter shows “what happens when individual lives collide with their particular historical moments.” Unmarried and a teenager, Coulter was sent away from her family and community to live at one of those ubiquitous maternity homes while she waited to have her baby. As an unwed mother, she was treated by disdain at the hospital where her son was born, and expected to move on with her life after the fact as if the story had never happened.
Unsurprisingly, this moving on proves difficult, and the memoir goes on to show how Coulter carried her experience inside her for so many years in silence. Looking back, she questions how her parents could have let it happen, could have sent her away, could have let her give away her son. Eventually, years and lifetimes later, she and her son are reunited, and she’s forthright about the complicated nature of their relationship, and also about her anger at Canada’s closed adoption system that manipulated and wronged so many young woman just like her.
She writes, “…the feminist version of me… was born on a dark night in 1968 when I gave birth to my first child alone in a big crowded hospital. I knew at last that my feminism stems from the invisibility society demanded for unwed mothers back then; I knew that my sense of agency was born in a social order that dictated no one should stop to offer comfort to a frightened eighteen-year-old girl in labour simply because she wasn’t married… I knew.. that being a feminist and being a mother are inevitably connected, like fetus and placenta.” With excellent writing and perfect detail, Coulter paints a rather stark picture of life “back then”, though all of us who have ever been pregnant by mistake are well-aware that the experience carries a devastating stigma to this day.
There was no reason why I picked up Helen Potrebenko’s TAXI! to read next, except that both books had come in at the library at the very same time. But, as in my first Never Mind the Patriarchy experience in March, random books brought forth remarkable connections. Once again, I was reading a book that Anakana Schofield had recommended, this time TAXI!, which Schofield calls her “favourite Vancouver novel” (and you can believe it). It’s the story of Shannon, a female taxi driver in Vancouver during 1971 and 1972. The episodic novel follows Shannon as she philosophizes and longs for revolution, driving the streets of Vancouver with various down-and-outs and scumbags throwing up in her backseat.
Says Shannon, “There are so so few choices for women. They’ve got you in a cage. If you’re bad they tighten the bars around you so you’ve got no space at all. They they give you back the original cage and call that freedom.”
It’s a funny book, but timeless in a way that is tragic. Protesters erect tent cities in local parks, unions are striking, there is social unrest, not enough jobs for young people, and there’s a war going on. “The first time Shannon drove cab drunk out of her mind was the Christmas after the War Measures Act.” TAXI! could have been written yesterday, which is a mark for Helen Potrebenko, but bad luck for the rest of us. Shannon herself would probably not be so surprised, having never suffered any illusions about progress.
June 6, 2012
To market, to market
The market opened today, and it was a glorious bounty, perhaps due to our early spring. It was wonderful to see so many familiar faces, people we know from the neighbourhood and farmers we haven’t seen since last October who commented on how enormous Harriet has grown in the meantime. And it’s true– this time last year, I had to wear Harriet on my back to the market or else she’d escape, and then she’d scream whenever it was time to leave, and I think she got a bad reputation. Today, however, she stood at my side like an actual human being, and it was so exciting to see strawberries, beets, garlic scapes, cherry tomatoes, and kale, plus say hello to our favourite maple syrup and honey men. It is very nice to say hello to summer again, and also to see how far we’ve come.
June 5, 2012
Library Owl
While I am quite familiar with the griffin and the lion flanking the entrance to the Lillian H. Smith Library, it was only today that I discovered the owl. It’s on the front of the building toward the west end, sort of hidden behind a sign on the sidewalk and I’d never noticed it before as I charged along the sidewalk, stroller in hand, hurrying home in time for lunch and nap-time. But Harriet has taken to walking, and as a result, our routes along the sidewalk have become much more meandering. Which is kind of annoying, but how brilliant when it yields a treasure. I have no doubt that wandering with Harriet will improve my city sight.
And just when I thought the Lillian H. Smith Library couldn’t be any more wonderful…
More: Joan Bodger and the Lillian H. Smith Library (see final paragraphs)
June 4, 2012
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
“Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-Enchantment” was an essay by Patricia Robertson in Canadian Notes & Queries 84, in which Robertson decried contemporary writers in general for their failure to imagine the world beyond the individual, and the failure of contemporary writing to be anything but tedious. Hers was an inspiring argument, even stirring, and yet… I’m not yet tired of the kind of novel she’s maligning. Domesticated fiction remains what I most want to read, and I’m not nearly finished with it yet. And I don’t even have a good argument as to why this should be the case, except that I think that with the reader taking an imaginative leap, domesticated fiction can do as well as the fantastic, or any other kind of literature, to “incorporate some of the wildness, the strangeness, the mystery of the world around us.” To show that we are indeed “participants in a vast web of being.”
And all this is preamble to the fact that tonight is the night Jeffrey Eugenides has been freaking out about for ages, the night I give my two cents on his latest novel The Marriage Plot (which my husband gave me for Christmas, I’ll have you know. How domesticated is that?). My Jeffrey Eugenides backgrounder is this: I think I tried to read The Virgin Suicides once, but couldn’t; I thought the movie was really weird; I liked Middlesex a lot, except for the part where Cal joined the circus, because in those parts, the novel wasn’t domesticated anymore. All of which suggests that I come to The Marriage Plot with a lot less Eugenides-related baggage than the average avid reader. But I come to it hesitantly all the same because I’d heard reports of reader dissatisfaction, because I’m allergic to hype, and because the novel sports all these allusions to literary theory and David Foster Wallace, and I know as much about one as the other, which is nothing.
But then I started to read it, the first line: “To start with, look at all the books.” And then Eugenides describes the contents of Madeleine Hanna’s bookshelves, and then it was clear that he’d written this novel just for me. It begins the morning of Madeleine’s graduation as she’s still dealing with fallout from the breakup of her relationship with Leonard and runs into an old friend Mitchell who’s sweet on her and who only makes her angry. The plot swoops back and forth from past to present, and it’s true that here is one of these books where everything that happens has happened already, but how I admire Eugenides’ command of chronology and all the details. Though the details themselves are not the point, instead the plot is. On one level (and there are several) the novel is an exercise as to whether 19th century romance/marriage plots can work in a 20th century story, and I come away from the book assured that they always have.
The Marriage Plot is social satire, academic satire, a bookish orgy, and the most beautiful celebration of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline that I’ve ever come across in a 400 page novel written by a man. Yes, there were times when I skimmed, allusions that went over my head, and did read the book a little wide-eyed, a bit too eager to attribute significance at every turn. That the 1982 “Cosby-sweater” reference could not be an anachronism surely, and that Eugenides, with some kind of ironic gesture, had planted it there for a reason. And even if he hadn’t, it was planted all the same, and the text was a different place for it.
Eugenides shows that there is no torture quite like life in one’s early-twenties, regardless of the century. Here is the story of the most world’s most scalene love triangle, and the angles mean more than the love does. Manic-depressive Leonard with the tortured background who captivates the romantic Madeleine in a semiotics class, and Mitchell who is convinced that Madeleine is meant to be his wife but she’s having none of it (except for drunken gropings here and there). The first two become inextricably tangled and love doesn’t have so much to do with it. Meanwhile Mitchell is off on his grand tour, culminating in an experience volunteering at Mother Theresa’s mission in Calcutta, and he’s thinking maybe he’s a religious mystic but suspecting that this isn’t the case. He’s become obsessed with The Jesus Prayer and insists that Franny Glass has got nothing to do with it. All the time that Leonard and Madeleine are cracking up and up, and then she and Mitchell meet up again at a party a year after their graduation…
And that ending, so perfect. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but Reader, she says, “Yes.”
May 31, 2012
Franklin Stamps
There is not much we love at our house more than we love mail and books (except perhaps for bunting, tea, and train journeys) and it’s always a joy when worlds collide. Yesterday, we picked up a set of Franklin the Turtle stamps at the post office, and we’re in love with them. But they confuse us too, because Harriet thinks they’re stickers and wants to stick them all over her hands and legs, and as for me, I can’t see myself using them anytime soon because then we wouldn’t have them anymore!
More about postal goodness: the joy of postcards.
May 31, 2012
Full Frontal T.O. by Patrick Cummins and Shawn Micallef
Now here is a book that our entire family can love, though not immediately, because after I picked it up at the bookstore last Thursday evening, I read it all through dinner and didn’t talk to anybody. Which was kind of annoying, but when I finally shared the book, they understood. Even the three year old, who found the pictures fascinating and absorbing, context not really being the point of their appeal. Full Frontal T.O.: Exploring Toronto’s Architectural Vernacular collects a series of photos by Patrick Cummins who’s been documenting Toronto’s street-scapes since the 1980s. Context is provided by way of Shawn Micallef’s pithy text. The photos show how the same city blocks have changed over time in some ways, and remained the same in others– the gist of the approach is shown on the Full Frontal blog.
The black and white images of single building or blocks changing over time is an urban time machine, showing patterns of decay and gentrification, or stagnation, in other cases. Interspersed throughout the book are full colour spreads of buildings grouped by theme– dead stores, semi-detached houses, gothic cottages, DIY cottages (which is my favourite– these buildings fascinate me), variety stores. And the effect of all of this is make me realize how little I actually see of the city around me. We walk its streets as if we’re sleeping, and then turn to a book like this to find so much that is familiar, so much that is in my neighbourhood, so many buildings that I’ve wondered about (like this one!) but it never occurred me to take curiosity further than that.
Every time I’ve opened this book, I’ve discovered something new– my ex-boyfriend’s old house, places right around the corner, blocks of streets I used to walk down daily, and lines like, “It’s good to stick your head out of a window sometimes because, apart from looking out of, that’s what they’re made for,” a critique of Toronto’s ubiquitous three-panelled windows. And in this way Full Frontal T.O. is a simulacrum of the city itself– you never encounter it the same way twice.
May 29, 2012
The Occasion is Lavender
I only bake when it’s a special occasion, but the problem is that I seem to unearth occasions daily. Today it’s that the lavender in the front garden is in glorious bloom. We snipped twelve sprigs, and then I set to bake lavender cupcakes, which I’ve always wanted to bake, so that’s another life goal accomplished. I used the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which has proven a very poor instruction manual in my experience. All the measurements are in imperial and I don’t own a kitchen scale, so I have to guess the measurements and so I’ve never had a recipe from that book come out right. Though these lavender cupcakes turned out to be pretty damn acceptable. The flower is absolutely delicious. And though Harriet claims that she doesn’t like them, we’ll try her again tomorrow.
May 28, 2012
All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen
Summer is here, at least in spirit, and the cover of Alice Petersen’s short story collection All the Voices Cry meant that I had to read the book at once. (Book has been reviewed well already, and been long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.) Though these are not stories of lazy, hazy days; the fish ain’t jumping and the cotton’s not high. Petersen’s are most often stories of summer places out of season, or of people out of place in those summer places. And the places themselves– rural Quebec, Petersen’s native New Zealand, even Tahiti– frame characters’ expectations in terms of idyll, pastoral, and usually (as is the way) experience comes up short.
Alice Petersen knows her way around a good sentence: “We knew he drank at night on the boathouse steps; the more beer he drank, the more bottles there were to get a refund on.” This from the first story, whose title “After Summer” is a good way to frame the whole book. A young man is looking back at summer memories and the darker shadows behind them, contemplating his single father’s loneliness, and how the notion of family got away from them. In “Among the Trees”, a widow contemplates the life she’d built around her artist husband which manifested in the artists colony they built together on her family’s property. This colony is a centre the collection revolves around, many of its stories loosely linked to its characters and geography. We see the widow and her husband from the outside in “All the Voices Cry”, in which Freya, another widow, a neighbour and a stranger, walks through the surrounding woods in winter and contemplates her “sustaining illusions”.
We meet Freya again in “To Catch a Fish”, avoiding entering her cabin where her new lover is cooking dinner. And fish aren’t jumping indeed, to great consequence, we see, when Freya makes the choice to choose herself and her solitude, the ground she stands on. In “The Frog”, with subtle gestures, a single mother considers what ties her to her life and beyond it, and how people without children move through life like amphibians (which is something to wrap one’s head around, just what exactly Petersen means by this, and the process of engagement steeps the reader further in the story).
The last six stories in the collection are different from the others, removed from the Quebec landscape we’ve been planted in thus far. Also, these stories are more storied, artificial, set-up than the others (which is not a criticism). Though I could get this impression from these stories’ settings’ unreality in my own mind. They take place in New Zealand gardens, on the International Date Line, on Tahitian cliff sides, foggy beaches. A few of them also have a mystical nature, and maybe that’s where the airiness comes from. A man enacts futile attempts to defy a psychic’s predictions, a woman dares to abandon her vexing husband in the middle of a tropical nowhere, a couple attempts to ignore potentially devastating news by going through the motions of sight-seeing, characters’ own lonely histories bubble up inside them.
None of Petersen’s characters is quite where they’re meant to be, where they want to be, and they see themselves in new lights against the unfamiliar contexts. The book is slim, the stories are subtle and quiet, and though their impact is not always immediate, All the Voices Cry is a collection you might want to meditate on, its pages getting dog-earned and stained with coffee rings as the summer wears on.
UPDATE: Speaking of quiet depth…
