August 29, 2013
Get up and go
The best lesson this summer has taught us is that sometime you just have to get up and go, and worry about the details later, which is how we’ve made it to Toronto Island, the zoo, and the Canadian National Exhibition in the past two and a half weeks, whereas when Harriet was 12 weeks old, we just sat at home watching her, cowering in fear. Today’s somewhat impractical decision was to go out for dinner at Fanny Chadwicks, because it was a perfect summer night and we’ve been wanting to try out their patio (which has astroturf!). Anyone who has ever met anyone who measures out their years in single digits is well aware that children have a tendency to go berserk after 5pm, which is why lunch is always a much better bet. But no matter. Dinner it was, and so early too that we had the whole patio to ourselves. The light was fantastic, the food was delicious as ever, Iris only squawked like a pterodactyl until the food arrived, and then she sat sweetly in her stroller chewing on a cloth book. Harriet declared her macaroni the best she’s ever had. I drank a pint of beer, which always results in me loving the world ferociously and crying about how beautiful life is. Iris discovered her feet. Stuart ate a slice of lemon cake and decided life was beautiful too. Harriet continued her new habit of telling everyone she loves them, this time our waitress. We did the Mad Libs in Chirp magazine and found them hilarious. And then we walked home glorying in summerness, and marvelling that such a perfect day could arise out of one that began with a family trip to the dentist.
We had no cavities. Obviously.
August 28, 2013
True Confession
Last week on our biannual visit to the mall, I bought gendered Lego. But that’s not the whole story. Read my True Confession here.
August 26, 2013
Have Milk Will Travel: EVENT!
I am excited to be part of an event on Friday September 13 to launch the anthology about breastfeeding Have Milk Will Travel, along with editor Rachel Epp Buller, Carrie Snyder, and Sarah Campbell, all of whom have work published in the book. I am not published in the book, but I am really looking forward to reading it. I will be doing a short presentation entitled “When Love Isn’t a Let-Down After All”, and you should probably know that yesterday I breastfed on a subway platform, and last week while walking to the pandas at the zoo. Shedding all inhibitions has been an incredibly liberating experience, and I am impressing myself with my dexterity.
August 26, 2013
Sweet Summer
I’ve been drinking tea with sugar cubes since the end of July. This came about while we were at the cottage and I was drinking my tea out of a pyrex mug, and it just seemed wrong to take tea in pyrex without sugar, so I bought a box of sugar cubes at the Foodland in Coboconk because regular sugar came in 2kg bags which was much too much for the cottage. Sugar cubes, however, proved impossible to quit, and even once I was home with my regular mug, two cubes had become necessary to keep my cuppa tea proper. Sugar cubes, it seems, are irresistible, part building-block, part sweetener. But they are made to be rare, I think. I don’t want to be the kind of person with sugar cubes always in my cupboard after all, which is the very definition of decadence. And so I’m drinking my final cup of sweetened tea as I write this now, the last two cubes from the sugar cube box dissolved within. (A spoonful of sugar would be sweet enough, but hardly offers the same appeal.) It’s going to be a difficult transition back to the unsweetened life, but I am determined to be brave enough to weather it.
And speaking of tea, I underlined this passage from Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt: “I went restlessly out and crossed the little garden where an American couple… were having tea. One of them was raising a little bag, like a drowned animal, from his cup at the end of a cord. At that distressing sight I felt very far away from England…”
August 25, 2013
Mary Pratt: On Blogging, and Preserving Light and Time
MARY PRATT Smears of Jam, Lights of Jelly. 2007. oil on canvas 40.6 x 50.8 cm
It is not a huge leap to look at Mary Pratt’s paintings and have thoughts turn to ideas about the containment and preservation of time. Not least of all because of her paintings of preserves, jams and jellies. Or because she shows that jam jars are containers of not only condiments, but also of light. In the essay “A Woman’s Life” by Sarah Milroy, part of the Mary Pratt book, Pratt recalls early inspiration in her mother’s jars of jelly: “Oh they were gorgeous… she would arrange them along the window-ledge–they were west-facing windows with the light coming through–red currant jelly, highbush cranberry jelly, raspberry jelly, blackberry jelly–all as clear as glass.”
In her work, Pratt also includes more prosaic containers, such as tupperware, and ketchup bottles, as well as preservation agents that capture light with a different kind of beauty–tin foil, saran wrap. Underlining this idea of preservation is that Pratt’s paintings themselves have been painted from photographs, that with a camera Pratt has been able to stop time and preserve a moment in the whirl of domesticity–a supper table that will soon be cleared away, for example. In Sarah Fillmore’s essay “Vanitas”, Pratt notes that “The camera was my instrument of liberation. Now that I no longer had to paint on the run, I would pay each gut reaction its proper homage. I could paint anything that appealed to me… I could use the slide to establish the drawing and concentrate on the light, and the content and the symbolism.”
Whilst reading the Mary Pratt book, which has been created to complement the exhibition of Pratt’s work that will be moving across the country in the coming months, I kept drawing parallels between her work and the womanly art of blogging. This precludes any arguments about amateurism of course, however much some may insist that “blogger” and “amateur” are in fact synonyms. Because Pratt is no amateur, and neither are the bloggers who make art of the form, who craft their posts themselves in order to “pay each gut reaction its proper homage.”
“…it comes from a longing to hold truth in your hands, to feel something of your own existence–a longing to feel alive… The painting of the jelly jar is really about the way that light shines through the glass, the way that light is preserved, like jelly, for all time.” -Sarah Fillmore, “Vanitas”
MARY PRATT Supper Table 1969 oil on canvas 61.0 x 91.4 cm
Pratt captures the domestic, the seemingly mundane. And yet behind her rich but also simple and familiar images lie deeper stories. Her painting “Kitchen Table”, the first she created from a photograph in 1969, is at first a quiet scene, a table at once empty and yet crowded with the remains of a meal–a ketchup bottle with its cap off, a hotdog left uneaten, crumbs on a plate, drinking glasses in varying states of emptiness (or fullness, perhaps?). And yet, as Catherine M. Mastin points out in her essay “Base, Place, Location and the Early Paintings”, “Pratt’s postwar-era family table is a site of constant labour, meal after meal–which all fell to Mary, with no foreseeable end.” On a more personal note, Pratt’s “Eggs in an Egg Crate” was the first work she completed after the deaths of her infant twins, a painting whose symbolism wasn’t clear to her until somebody else had pointed it out–that the eggs in the carton were empty.
MARY PRATT Eggs in an Egg Crate, 1975 oil on Masonite 50.8 x 61.0 cm
For all their luminosity and the domestic focus, Pratt’s paintings are also wonderfully subversive. Her eggs are usually broken, is what I mean, the cake half-eaten and cut with a big sharp knife, the bananas in the fruit bowl are just a little too ripe. The meat in her “Roast Beef” is a charred hunk (and Pratt recounts in Milroy’s essay, “I can remember when I first showed it in a gallery [and] I heard a woman say, ‘Well, I guess she can paint, but do you think she can cook?'”). Milroy is correct that “In this day of highly stylized food photography…, Mary Pratt’s work seems ahead of the curve,” and yet Pratt’s food paintings are always just a little “off”–the leftovers from a supper of hotdogs, for example, or the casserole dish in the microwave. This is food that people eat, instead of a lacquered sandwich intended for a magazine cover. Hers is a messy, imperfect domestic scene, and yet there is beauty in these scenes that are captured precisely as they are.
MARY PRATT Split Grilse, 1979 oil on Masonite 56.1 x 64.0 cm
Her images of meat and animal carcasses suggest something basic and bodily about domestic life, a suggestion echoed vaguely in the images of her model “Donna”. “That’s what women do,” Pratt recounts in Milroy’s essay. “They wrap things up, or unwrap them, or cut them open, or chop them, ready for the oven.” Fish are also a recurring image in her work, not surprising considering she’s based in Atlantic Canada, but here is the rarely seen flip-side of maritime life–“Salmon on Saran”, “Trout in a Ziploc Bag” or “Fish Head in Steel Sink”. They don’t write shanties about this kind of sea. And then there is the fire, Pratt’s burning dishcloth on her “Dishcloth on Line” paintings. That same agent used to wipe down the table of dinner-after-dinner is annihilated into a glorious flame which captures the light as intriguingly (and eternally, now that Pratt has preserved the image) as do the far more innocuous jars of jam on the window sill.
Whoever thought the kitchen was a scene of mundanity probably wasn’t looking…
In her essay “Look Here”, Mireille Eagan writes that “Ultimately, [Pratt] asks the viewer to see; she tells us: “Look, here.” Which is what the very best bloggers do too, instead of “Look at me!” using their blogs to implore their readers to, “Look at this!” The result of this being the “sideways autobiography” that Eagan refers to of Pratt’s work. There is no over-arching narrative here, and instead we come to understand the depth of these writers’ lives from the objects, moments and stories they choose to include in their blogs, each individual post its own still-life. Like Pratt, these bloggers are curating their lives, crafting something permanent out of the whirl of the ephemeral. As Eagan writes of Pratt: “Her images reveal a pattern of privacies, of things half-visible, half-said–but articulated, nonetheless. They represent a lifetime of looking closely, an intimation of the buzzing pause before one turns and continues.”
MARY PRATT Between the Dark and the Daylight, 2011 oil on canvas 50.8 x 76.2 cm
Mary Pratt is available from Goose Lane Editions. Read more about this stunning book here.
August 24, 2013
Buy hardback fiction and poetry.
“Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don’t buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.”– Annie Dillard, “Notes for Young Writers”
August 20, 2013
On a bookish coincidence, and long-time friends
It has been fifteen years since I met my friend Katie, as we walked across Queens Park at the end of Vic’s Frosh Week. From the moment I first encountered her, in the midst of that disorientating, overwhelming time of enormous upheaval, I knew I’d found someone remarkable, someone who would be a real friend, and so she has been ever since. We supported one another through dating woes (or, in my case, woes that came from lack of dates–I used to drink too much and then come over to her house and cry). We both partook in university activities, and each graduated with the Golden V awards. We kept in touch during the years I was abroad, and she was establishing a school at Ronald McDonald House. After I moved back to Canada, we were bridesmaids in each others’ wedding, and have lived within walking distance ever since. And now the fun continues as we find ourselves each the mother of two girls, Katie with her twin daughters who were born in December.
Last week, we got The Twins’ Blanket out of the library, and I knew immediately that I’d have to buy a copy for Katie, because I’d never read another book about twin Asian girls like hers. So I felt very clever today as we met up at the museum for the afternoon and I had a copy of the book in tow. There was no occasion for gift-giving, which made it all the more strange when Katie presented us with our own copy of The Twins’ Blanket, which she’d bought for Harriet. The strangest and most wonderful coincidence, to go home with the gift we came with. Not to mention the goodness of the rest of our afternoon.
August 17, 2013
Flaws in the cloth, flies in the ointment.
Me breastfeeding on a ferry-boat. I am proud of this.
It occurs to me that as I enter my mid-thirties, only now am I really learning how to be alive, how to be strong, to be brave. Part of this is having children (two! can you believe it?) which changes the stakes, but a large part of it is also flaws in the cloth, flies in the ointment finally starting to turn up after three decades in which things like good health and general happiness could still be taken for granted. And I wasn’t even going to write about this, for two days imagined that I wouldn’t have to, but this space is such an outlet for me. It also seems very dishonest to document the truly lovely parts of my life but leave out the sordid bits. To let you know all my stunning achievements (yesterday I breastfed standing up on a ferry boat!) but neglect to inform you that I am once again waiting on biopsy results. “Biopsy”, which was once a terrifying prophecy but has actually become an idea as banal as is the actual experience.
I returned to my thyroid doctor on Thursday for what I hoped would be my final appointment, the one where he told me to return annually for lump-checks but all would be well, but discovered that my thyroid lump has grown again. They did a biopsy, and I tried not to cry, and in doing so, forgot to ask questions properly about the state of my lump and therefore now my imagination is taking me to terrible places again. Though not so terrible–my lump is mainly cystic, which makes the change not so surprising. As it was not cancer before, it is likely to not be cancer again (though I fear believing too strongly in this until I know for sure, for fear of being absolutely gutted by reality. Also, I was only reassured that it was probably nothing by the resident doctor, and I fear she was just trying to be nice. I liked better being reassured by the doctor himself as I was before, as he is devoid of social skills and therefore would never just try to be nice. See, all this worrying takes one down twisty, twisty roads). Even if it was cancer, it is a cancer that will not change my life significantly. Though not being cancer won’t mean I get off easy either–the fact that the lump is changing suggests that I may still require a thyroidectomy. (Initially I wrote “will probably require…” but changed it, as I don’t in fact know this, or anything, and wild speculations have taken us to stupid places before, so let’s not do that again.) And while I can console myself that life will go on after this, and I could have far, far worse problems, sometimes these consolations are not quite enough and I find myself feeling quite sad, hence the need to sit down and write this post here on my blog.
This may be the last post I ever write on this computer. I turned on my computer last night, and the system had gone haywire. It’s working properly today, but I think this machine is reaching the end of its life. (Harriet is confused by our insistence on talking about computers “dying” and “being brought back to life”. It is strange but not so surprising that we accord them such essential mortal characteristics.) 4 years ago, my computer “broke down in an altogether final sense” and I lost many precious things, learning a very important lesson about backing up my files and also that computers don’t last forever (a fact I still resent: they are so expensive!). Consequently, the loss of this machine is not a big deal and I have enough money to buy a new computer, which I think I am going to do today before driving this one completely into the ground.
However clunky and unpretty, these computers suit as a kind of metaphor. (Forgive me, but my computer really is an extension of myself.) The crash 4 years ago came on my 30th birthday, a few weeks after Harriet was born. I lost everything, which was sort of how I was feeling those days, the disclocation of self that came with new motherhood. I consoled myself with the opportunity of a blank slate, stories to be written in replacement of those I had lost. And I am proud of what I’ve made in the years since. This time, however, there has been no crash. This computer I’m losing not long after the birth of Iris has all its files back-upped elsewhere. Instead of being caught unaware, I’m averting disaster. And instead of being inspired by a blank slate, I’m just inspired in general, more ready than ever to build on what I’ve created in the last four years.
I was terrified at the prospect of another new baby, that after the progress we’d made in the parent-game of having to go all the way back to the beginning. But it hasn’t been like that at all. The biggest surprise of having Iris in our lives is how clear she’s made it that I’ve actually been in a stasis the last four years, a kind of limbo as we sorted out the question of a second child, whether or not to have one. And now she is here and it’s as though we’re moving forward, finally. I suspect that I am probably done having children, and now it’s time to look outward, to focus on other things. I am enormously excited to think of what lies before me, of the things I’m going to write on the new computer that comes into my life today. (I am also returning to the Mac life, I think, which will automatically make me a more physcially attractive human being).
And so it goes, flaws in the cloth. I’m finally learning how normal life is supposed to go. Oh, but how I do love the cloth, this life, right here in what just might be the very best summer (and believe me, I’ve known some excellent summers in my time). And I love this blog as a proper reflection of it all, the good and the bad, and I am so grateful for this space where take note of all the things that are important to me. And to those people who are reading.
August 15, 2013
Books in the Meantime
And there are books in the meantime. My vacation reads continued right up until yesterday. I read Grace Paley’s Collected Stories for a whole week, and they were amazing, difficult, heavy and gorgeous. I admire her sympathy for all/most sides of an argument, her courage in exploring unlikeable characters. I’d not read her since I became a mother, and I must confess that it’s altered the experience. “Faith in a Tree” was my very favourite. That phrase, “my comrades in the mother-trade”–it has stuck by me. I think we’d all get along so much better if we thought about things in those terms.
After, I read This One’s Mine by Maria Semple, the first novel by the author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette? It was not a very good book, and yet I read the whole thing and enjoyed it, which is significant because I have very little stomach for not very good books these days. Lack of quality aside, there was something about it. Semple’s characters are so profoundly unlikeable, absolutely offensive, politically incorrect. I was horrified again and again, and it’s not so often that happens. In this novel, Semple is not so adept at plot, but she creates fascinating, surprising characters. I also loved the novel’s setting, its LA, which made me realize that although the two books have nothing in common stylistically, This One’s Mine is actually Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays on bubblegum. So I read Play It… next, the second time I’ve done so, and I really liked it, whereas I think it just confused me last time. I think I’ve realized that a short book cannot necessarily be read so breezily.
And now I am back reading new releases, Night Film by Marisa Pessl, which Janet Meslin really didn’t like very much. Gearing up for September too, getting ready for projects and assignments. Basically, my maternity leave is over, but this feels right. It doesn’t seem very healthy to be all-consumed by someone who is 10 weeks old anyway, even if she can roll over. (Yes!)
