December 3, 2012
Talented Friends
This busy weekend featured a couple of my talented friends, and not for having written books even! On Saturday night, we attended the very exciting Toronto premiere of the short film “How to Keep Your Day Job”, based on the short story of the same name by Rebecca Rosenblum. It was so wonderful to be there in a room full of people, all of us collectively laughing at the humour and gasping at the otherwise. The film was so well done, underlining the goodness of its foundation. The film has already been shown in Calgary, and if you hear of it coming about somewhere near you, definitely go and see it.
And then last night I went to the theatre! I saw Strolling Player at the Red Sandcastle Theatre in Leslieville, written by Heidi Reimer and her husband Richard Willis, and starring Richard, a 90 minute one-man show about his life in theatre that begins with his birth (on purpose) at Stratford-Upon-Avon. A life in 90 minutes that takes up from a summer theatre in Guernsey, to stages in London’s West End, marriages wrought to ruin by tabloid journalism, exhausting tours across America, and a most unlikely true love discovered in the wilds of West Virginia. It was by turns funny, sad, and always excellent. I was so thrilled to be there, and very excited to learn that the show will be staged this summer as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. Do not miss this one…
December 2, 2012
It's December
It’s December, which means that we’re listening to Darlene Love on repeat, and trying to reconcile our secular selves with this religious holiday with a great deal of joy. (Christmas is about lighting the darkness. It is about the promise of new life. I like that.) It means that the tree isn’t up yet, too soon, but the halls are decked, and the Christmas books are unpacked into the pile that just keeps on growing. Over the next three weeks, I’ll be sharing some of them with you here. If I were so inclined I’d even put together a Christmas Book Advent Calendar–what a wonderful idea! Over at 49thShelf, we’re celebrating Canadian books with the Lit Wish List campaign, so many great ideas for giving and receiving. And the other Scaredy Squirrel Gingerbread Houses have put our efforts to shame, so much so that we’ve decided just to eat ours and forget about it and pretend this never happened.
In huge news though, I have a new hat.
November 29, 2012
The Vicious Circle reads Straight Man by Richard Russo
Last evening, various circumstances conspired to have me learn that it takes just 20 minutes to drive from Pharmacy and Lawrence Avenues in Scarborough to Brockton Village downtown, and to have it confirmed for the one millionth time that from the vantage point of the Gardiner Expressway between the DVP and Spadina, Toronto at night is one of the most beautiful sights in the world. And so I was a bit late for our Vicious Circle gathering but not so late, due to the swiftness of my journey, and I was pleased that they’d saved me a plate of macaroni and cheese. We’re also developing a thing for cheesies. Needless to say, it was a very balanced meal.
Our book was Straight Man by Richard Russo, an academic satire (we like academic satires) that which was pretty favourably received, except for one of us who found it so much like Michael Chabon’s The Wonder Boys that we didn’t see the point in finishing. Others found it funny and a comfort read, though one of us found the whole academia-line a little too close to home, not so funny after all. There was speculation as to whether academia really has this much sex, and we decided yes, although it was noted that professors don’t marry their students at quite the same rate that they used to.
Russo has written better books, it was pointed out–Empire Falls. It was decided that he’s not great at writing endings. We wondered about the relationship between this book and Lucky Jim, and wondered what kind of 50 year old man (or anyone, for that matter) would aspire to be Lucky Jim. Lucky Hank is clever though, too clever for his own good, actually, where Jim really wasn’t, which was the book’s point.
The scene of the naked journalist in the hot-tub, the image of her caking make-up like her face was falling off. The female characters in the book was as interesting as their male counter-parts. There was great writing here. We loved the complexity and grown-up nature of Hank’s marriage, and that he never cheats on his wife nor she on him. It’s too easy a plot point and this book is more for doing something different. This is a comic novel, but it’s not without considerable complexity–the lines that run through it about suicide, the scene with young Hank thinking about hanging himself from a pipe in the basement until he’s rescued by his mother, and she saves him, but the incident drives them forever apart. We liked his mother too, and her sometime paramour/chauffeur.
It’s a book much like its character–it can’t help going for the easy laugh. We thought about Lucky Jim again (though we called it Lord Jim for a moment, and then acknowledged that Conrad went for the easy laugh not often), and how much more complex was Russo’s book. There are depths here, though none of us were sure we’d visit its 400 pages again in order to plumb them.
November 27, 2012
Here and There
No blog post of considerable substance today because I have scheduled a marathon tonight to get though 200 pages of Richard Russo’s Straight Man before my book club meets tomorrow night. Whatever book I’m reading next is not allowed to be 400 pages along–I need a dose of brevity. In huge news, Harriet turned 3.5 yesterday and therefore had her photo taken with Miffy. We can’t quite believe how much she’s turned into a big girl since her birthday 6 months ago. Her Daddy also had a birthday this weekend, an actual full birthday, and it was a pleasure to celebrate his goodness (and eat cupcakes). In great luck news, we participated in a community clean-up on Saturday and found $10 in a leafpile. On Sunday, we stopped by the AGO to see Monica Kulling read from her new book Lumpito, which we’re all a little fond of. I was thrilled to see a couple of my favourite books of 2012 turn up on the Globe and Mail’s best book round-up— Mad Hope and The Juliet Stories. Other exciting things are Obama supporting indie bookshops; a new novel by India Knight!; and this excellent book vending machine which I have to visit asap. As soon as I finish reading Straight Man, that is…
November 25, 2012
Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
In her latest novel Flight Behaviour, as ever, Barbara Kingsolver has written a novel about ecology. “Ecology is the study of biological communities. How populations interact,” so explains lepidopterologist Ovid Byron. The populations Kingsolver considers in Flight Behaviour are the Turnbrows, a farming family from Appalachia fallen on hard times, and their feisty daughter-in-law Dellarobia who, after ten years, is still an outsider in their midst. When Dellarobia discovers that an enormous population of monarch butterflies have settled in the forest on her family’s mountain, the family encounters other populations previously unimaginable–a team of scientists, environmentalists, frenzied journalists. And finally, on a biological level, Kingsolver is writing about the displaced monarch population and whatever factors in a climate gone awry have led them off their usual migratory route.
Though much more accessible and concerned with the lives of ordinary people (as opposed to Frieda Kahlo and Trotsky), Flight Behaviour is a continuation of the ideas Kingsolver dealt with in The Lacuna, a brilliant book which won the Orange Prize in 2010. She is concerned with an America-divided, a nation stuck on its false binaries, and eroding itself with creeping anti-intellectualism. Flight Behaviour is set in the present day, and its underlying premise is climate change.
Its impact seems obvious–crops are lost to rainy summers, winter never really arrives. And yet to the Turnbrows, “climate change” is an idea, a debate. At least this is what the men on the radio tell them. The crazy weather is another way in which Dellarobia Turnbrow has no control over her life, a life in which there is never enough money, enough work, and she and her husband have never managed to escape from under the thumb of her over-bearing mother-in-law Hester. One day, however, as the book begins, Dellarobia decides to take at least one part of her life into her own hands, and set in motion a series of events to free her from everything. She’s heading up the mountain toward her own escape route, a liaison with a man who is not her husband.
She never gets there–she sees the butterflies instead, and without her glasses, the red looks like the world on fire. Convinced she’s seen a sign, she returns back to the place where she belongs, unaware that the sign she’s seen is an indicator of something with nothing to do with her and family at all, but which also to do with everything.
Ovid Byron, the butterfly scientist, shows up amidst the journalists, hippie kids and sight-seers with an interest in the phenomenon on the Turnbrow mountain. He sets up camp out behind Dellarobia’s house, and she’s taken on by his team as a assistant. The team, feels Dellarobia, is from another world, with their expensive gear, their years of learning, understanding of the wider world, experiences of travel. Dellarobia has a reputation as “the smart one” but was never able to make much of it after getting pregnant at the end of high school, and shotgunning it into early marriage. And suddenly with her new job (and its income), the world becomes open to her in a way it hasn’t been in years. Unfortunately, this opening is occurring as the world is in peril–what has provoked the butterflies to change their patterns? Will the population make it through the Appalachian winter, so different from the Mexican climate they’re accustomed to. And will they be able to convince Dellarobia’s father-in-law to change his mind about clear-cutting the entire mountain, a decision he’d made to get the family through one payment of a massive debt?
Complicating binaries is what Barbara Kingsolver does, and so this is not just a story about how a group of scientists delivered enlightenment to a simple country girl, and neither is this an inversion in which the humble girl teaches the big city folks a thing or two about the real world. No, Kingsolver has a reverence for learning, and science wins the day, but she shows the way in which so many Americans are cut-off from understanding their stake in the climate change crisis. First, because they have other concerns–overdue bills and foreclosures, dying industries, dying towns, and also because they’ve become accustomed to seeing people just like themselves made a mockery of on television, and they start to believe that televised world is their reality. On a more practical level, whole populations lack access to decent education and resources like libraries. Kingsolver shows the ways in which climate-change denial becomes a kind of foundation myth, a way of defining self and survival, entirely entwined with personal and group identity. And that middle-class do-gooders know nothing about it– Kingsolver has a brilliant scene in which Dellarobia is urged by an environmentalist to take a pledge to reduce her carbon footprint. To bring tupperware for restaurant leftovers, when she’s not eaten in a restaurant for over two years; to carry a Nalgene instead of buying bottled water; to reduce intake of red-meat, when her family can barely afford any; and to fly less. Fly less. This to Dellarobia, who has never flown anywhere.
Most writers couldn’t pull this off, and Kingsolver doesn’t entirely—there are moments when we’re all too conscious that these characters have been born to have words put in their mouths– but the novel succeeds anyway for the greatness of its reach, the richness of its characters, its humour, for the depth of its author’s knowledge and understanding of the world, and her empathy for the people who inhabit it.
November 21, 2012
Scaredy Squirrel Gingerbread House (with a Building Permit)
Of everything we’ve ever received in the mail, the Scaredy Squirrel gingerbread house certainly takes the cake. It’s not just any gingerbread house kit, you see, because it comes with a building permit, and special instructions by Scaredy Squirrel on building the house right to code. Further, the gingerbread is completely delicious and has filled our entire house with the redolence of Christmas (already). Perhaps reminding us that there are only 30-some days left in which to come prepared for the holiday, and in accordance, we’ve also been equipped with the brand new Scaredy Squirrel book, Scaredy Squirrel Prepares for Christmas. With instructions to wear a hockey helmet (in case of falling ornaments), and to avoid candy canes (might shatter!!!).
The kit arrived yesterday, and Harriet insisted that we build it while her little friend Iole was visiting. It occurred to me at this point that 3 year-olds are far better are being agents of destruction than construction, and so this might be a terrible idea. It also made it quite possible that I’d end up swearing at Harriet in front of Iole’s mother.
Fortunately, the girls were very helpful, and we did the windows, and put the walls and roof up. I figured the instructions to wait overnight before decorating were only optional and we got started on that too, but then the house collapsed in on itself over and over again and I realized that maybe Scaredy Squirrel knew what he was talking about with his instructions. So we let the house dry, and Harriet finished decorating it this afternoon. We love it, and don’t know how long we can wait before we eat it– that smell! And the best thing is that I didn’t even swear once.
November 19, 2012
Reading in the First Trimester
I have so much trouble reading when I’m 6-12 weeks pregnant. As I’ve done it twice now, I can say for a fact that I am the problem and it’s not necessarily the books I encounter, all of which seem to me to be absolutely intolerable. In my first trimester of pregnancy, I completely lack the patience required to overlook the (often obligatory) parts of any book that are intolerable, and understand its fundamental goodness. I can’t read a book that’s very long either, because eventually it becomes associated with nausea and even the thought of the book makes me want to puke. I have a similar relationship with Calgary– every time I go there, I’m 6 or 8 weeks pregnant, and I can’t even think about it anymore. And with Cloud Atlas, whose first pages I read in Calgary and therefore never again.
Another book I can’t handle is Cybele Young’s A Few Bites, which is so so good! But the book came into my life when I was six weeks pregnant and when Ferdie is presented with his lunch of broccoli, carrot sticks, and ravioli, my stomach heaves. I can no longer eat broccoli, which is bizarre because I’ve always loved it, but no longer, temporarily I hope. We’ve had to ask our organic food delivery to stop bringing it because every week I threw it out.
There is Nicola Barker’s The Yips, which I bought in Calgary but Calgary was not even the problem. The biggest problem I think is that it was not as good as Burley Cross Postbox Theft or Darkmans, and I was so unhappy (and feeling sick) while I was reading it. There were a few weeks where I hated everything, and not just books, but then I started reading A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence, and began to feel better. Correspondance and short stories were the trick I guess, fragments, and perhaps this was why I was so elated to discover Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories–finally a book to fall in love with. And the Susans anthology. And slowly, slowly, I was happy to find that I could love books again. (I am not sure that Calgary will recover so easily.)
So yes, this is a round-about way of saying that after being the first woman ever to have a baby three and a half years ago, I am going to pioneer the act of having a second at the end of May. Literary trauma aside, I’ve had a relatively easy first trimester and have been so grateful for Harriet’s mornings at school so that I’ve still been able to get my work done. Grateful too that we dragged out Harriet’s napping through the weeks when I needed it most. Also that emotionally, I’ve have a much easier time of it this time around–with a three year old running around, less apparent miracles are easier to believe in. I have faith this time, and it’s so refreshing not be crazy (though we’ll see how long the sanity lasts. In my experience, it comes in limited quantities only).
I am excited and terrified, and hoping that everyone who promised it would be easier second-time around wasn’t lying. I am really excited for Harriet to become a sister. And most of all, I just feel enormously lucky, that this decision whether or not to have a second child was one we had the freedom and good fortune to make for ourselves.
November 18, 2012
Here We Are Among the Living by Samantha Bernstein
Non-fiction by women turns up with a predictable lack of frequency on literary prize lists, in particular when the non-fiction is of a personal bent. And so when I saw that Samantha Bernstein’s Here We Are Among the Living was on the longlist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, I absolutely had to check it out. Described as “a memoir in emails”, a chronicle of coming of age in Toronto at the (most recent) turn of the century, written by the youngest child of Irving Layton, this promised to be a book that was something different, a book that I might just happen to be the ideal reader for.
It begins with a prologue, 1999, Samantha writing to her friend Eshe about a road trip to Montreal with her friend Michael to attend a tribute to Irving Layton, the father she barely knows. Much of the journey is Sam negotiating her relationship with her famous father and with his legacy, but also becoming conscious of a developing attraction between her and Michael. When the book begins, we’re two years into the future, Sam and Michael’s relationship over but something lingering between them. It’s a few days after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and Sam is once again writing to Eshe, who has just started university studies in New York. She writes about her response to the tragedy, about her anger at other standard responses, about her frustrations with her mother who once espoused hippie ideals but turned her back on them with middle age. And so we go, from 2001 to 2005, the story of a girl growing up, finding her place in the world. At the book’s beginning, she’s just dropped out of UofT, is working at Starbucks, is living with her mother and cherishes their closeness just as she’s resentful of it.
Part of my attraction to this book is that Bernstein is documenting my time– she’s two years younger than I am but just a bit more worldly enough that our lives had their parallels. There was something peculiar about being 22 when the Twin Towers fell, on the threshold of a world that appeared to be crumbling. And for me, the Irving Layton part of Bernstein’s story functioned as a metaphor– how are we as a generation to find our place in the world in the enormous shadow of our parents’? So many of our values were their values once upon a time, but they outgrew them. Their culture remains our culture. What does it mean that we’re taking on their cast-offs? Will their cast-offs just destine us to make all the same mistakes?
Here We Are Among the Living is also a stunning record of an important time in the history of Toronto, of the burgeoning civic awareness that developed as the city turned into the new century. Bernstein writes of one Sunday when a shopkeeper bought a row of parking spaces in Kensington Market, and gave the road over to pedestrians, which turned into pedestrian Sundays. For years, her friends’ hang-out was a loft in old factory building down on Cherry Street, that would be turned over to demolition crews with the development of the West Don Lands. Her memoir includes Toronto under SARs, and the great blackout of 2003 (which is also depicted in Grace O’Connell’s novel The Magnetic World, and it makes me wonder where else it will turn up in literature yet-to-be-born).
And it’s not just recent history, but also geography. I was living in Toronto in 2001 as well, but my experience of the city was confined mainly to the university campus. Beyond Bathurst was the Wild West, and I never went north of Bloor except to see a movie at the Cumberland. Whereas Bernstein navigates the city like someone who has lived here her whole life, like somebody with a car. She writes about the peculiar circumstances of her upbringing, on the fringes of Forest Hill, on the fringes on the middle class (her mother drove a Saab, but it was 17 years old). She spent her childhood growing up on Thelma Avenue in a house her mother owned, and talks about its bizarreness, “a lower-middle-class street in a rich area” and I’ve checked out Google streetview–it’s still just as odd. She spent her teenage years in high-rises on Walmer Road, and at Yonge and St. Clair. She cris-crosses neighbourhoods, takes in the College Street scene, her boyfriend’s comfortable home in Riverdale, her eccentric friend who lives in a storefront converted from a dental office. She comes to understand, reluctantly, the futility of trying to make the best parts of the city forever stay the same.
Here We Are Among the Living is a documentation of intersections between the personal and political, like some of my favourite non-fiction books— Afflictions and Departures by Madeline Sonik and Subject to Change by Renee Rodin. It’s the story of the profound ways in which an ordinary woman understands her place within the wider world. I think the book also deserves attention in light of the success of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be, as Bernstein is engaging with the very same question. She writes, “All kinds of confused, difficult people have still done some good in the world; we aren’t the first ones tripped up by our own natures, who don’t know what to do or how to act. But in our uncertainty, trying at least to flesh out ideals we have stick with, create lives that won’t betray us too much.” And her book resonated with me where Heti’s didn’t, for a few reasons. That she called it true, for one, and that she asked the questions earnestly. And also that her characters are in their early ’20s rather than their late ’30s, and that in the trajectory of the book they grow up, that they actually come closer to understanding the kind of people they want to be. A lot of people do.
Which is not to say that all the enthusiasms of one’s early ’20s are to be thrown away with age. Samantha Bernstein grows up, but I found it interesting to read her older brother’s supposedly wise lectures on the value of capitalism and the goodness it has brought to countries like Greece and Spain. In light of the recent economic turmoil of these two countries, her youthful idealism does not seem so misplaced. She begins the book by dropping out of school, but finds herself by going back to academia, another school and another program and a bit more experience under her belt. I also find the structure of this memoir quite remarkable, a testament that electronic communication has value, that it’s capable of being literature, that young people have something to say and their own way to say it.
I don’t think this book is for everybody. It’s a bit too long, not always as profound as it imagines itself to be, is an exercise in self-indulgence, and yet I connected with it on so many levels. It’s a book I emailed my friends about, my friends who were sitting around a booth with me at a College Street diner on the night of September 11 2001, and I told them, “This is our story.” It’s a book that’s important for anyone who cares about women’s non-fiction (and if that’s not you, what’s wrong with you?). I loved it, and it’s truly one of the most remarkable books I’ve read this year. I’m so glad that the folks at the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction think so too.
November 15, 2012
Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place
One day when I finally get my act together, I will write an enormous blog post about how this summer we ended up buying every single book Virginia Lee Burton ever wrote. The entire Virginia Lee Burton library, which now lives on a shelf in the living room, rather than in Harriet’s room with the other kids’ books. Harriet adores them all, and they mean a whole lot to all of us, actually. I read Burton’s biography last year, and it only increased my appreciation for her work, for her genius. To learn how important she considered book design to be, how innovative she was as an illustrator, the extraordinary praise her sons had for her as an artist and as a mother, the richness of her life, and her vision. I learned that beyond her books, Burton was also a well-known textile designer, founder of the Folly Cove Designers artistic community. She was brilliant, and her work is timeless, and her ideas have influenced the way I’ve come to understand the world, and my relationship to my child.
So in all my enthusiasm, I was pleased to discover a 2008 PBS documentary about Burton called Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place. Stuart and I borrowed it from the library and sat down to watch it last weekend, and while much of the material was familiar to me from the biography (whose author acted as a consultant for the film), I enjoyed the movie very much. Interviews with Burton’s sons, friends and fellow-artists, and even Dickie Birkenbush himself! Other interviews with children’s authors, librarians, academics and artists provided great context to Burton’s story and underlined her singularity.
I don’t know that I’d ever paid attention to Burton’s books’ feminist angle. She wrote with her sons as her intended audience so that her subject matter is decidedly “boyish” (not that it stops my girl!)–a train, a steam shovel, a snow plow, a cable car, a horse in a Western. But all her subjects–the train, the steam shovel, the snow plow, the cable car, the house and even the Little House herself–are charactertized as female. The female characters are equal partners with male characters, independent, strong and hard-working. Which provides me with a whole new level of appreciation for these books, though it’s not as though I needed one…
See also: “What Sally Draper must have been reading: Virginia Lee Burton and Mad Men”
More details about the doc are here.
