February 19, 2011
If you need me…
…I will be beside the seaside. In February, no less! And with my computer, so you’ll be hearing from me from time to time.
February 16, 2011
Light at the end of the tunnel
On Saturday, we are going to England, baggage handler strike notwithstanding, and don’t worry, I have a new spring coat (the Christine trench, in geranium) because the weather is calling for rain. We are going for two weeks! I have never gone on a two week vacation in adulthood– this is a monumental occasion. I am exited about numerous things, and terrified about others (round-abouts!). But mostly at the moment, I am excited about books. I had a bunch of books to read for various reasons in the last two weeks, and then all my Toronto Library holds came in at once, so that reading is about all I’ve been doing this last while. But as soon as I’m finished with my final library book, I am going to read magazines until our departure, because, of course, I have to start every journey with a fresh book. It’s a superstition of mine.
I am going to take Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs with me to read, and on a six hour flight with a toddler, my goal is to read at least five pages. Once we’re settled and Harriet is in the care of her grandparents, however, there will be reading time aplenty (fit in around trips out for cream teas). I am also going to read my final Canada Reads Independently book, Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind, and I am bringing an ARC of Timothy Taylor’s new book The Blue Light Project.
Whilst in England, I plan on buying Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker, a novel by Rachel Cusk (but which. Any suggestions? I’ve only read Arlington Park and A Life’s Work), and a very odd book called Felicity and Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow, which isn’t actually British, but oh well. I will probably buy many other books too, especially since we are going to visit the London Review Bookshop (which is also a cake shop).
Once I’m home again, there’s a packed shelf of books I’m looking forward to bringing in the spring with, books that are too big for travel: Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You, the new PEN Anthology Finding the Words, and Zsuzsi Gartner’s story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. Among others, oh yes. Many, many others.
February 16, 2011
Wild libraries I have known: The Whitby Public Library
My childhood is lost to me, and so is its library. Which is not the library pictured here, the Whitby Carnegie Library. That one was “the old library”, now dental clinic, or something, but it recently came as a shock to me realize that my library is now the old library too. As lost to the physical world as it is to my memory, but first let me tell you about the fragments I have shored against the ruins.
I remember that the Whitby Public Library had very few windows, and it had the vibe of a basement, but this never bothered me, because it was the library. I used to go and check out chapter books, stack them on my bedside table and rotate through the entire stack one chapter after another. Someone once suggested that this was a strange way to approach a pile of books, and I couldn’t fathom what they were talking about. I used to dog-ear my pages. I used to read the last page first.
The Whitby Public Library had a cable access show whose theme song was some guy strumming a guitar and singing the lyric, “Strawberries, fresh strawberries. Cream and sugar, you just can’t wait!” Or something like that– perhaps I dreamed the whole thing. But I distinctly remember learning to draw a 3-dimensional-seeming chair after viewing a lessons on such things on the library show. I remember that the Chief Librarian was also an author, and he was Ken Roberts, who’d written Pop Bottles and Hiccup Champion of the World.
I hardly remember the library, in spite of its centrality to my early existence (and the centrality I do remember. The library was always a place of reverence). So I was excited to rediscover it via Google, make it truly a Wild library I have known (instead of a wild library I can scarcely recollect), except then I discovered that the library had been torn down. In fact, that it hadn’t even been a library at all. When the old library (pictured above) outgrew itself, the Whitby Public Library was moved into a temporary location in a former municipal building where it would live for nearly thirty years.
When a brand new state of the art library was opened in 2005 (and it is impressive. I’d include a photo, except it’s a library I’ve never known), the library of my childhood was reduced to rubble.
Update 2019: I have found photos of the library of my childhood online via the Whitby archives!! You can see them here, here, here, here, and here. And since I wrote this post 8 years ago, I HAVE visited the new Whitby Public Library, and it’s wonderful. I am going to be back there next week in conversation with my friend Marissa Stapley and it’s going to be fun.
February 15, 2011
More on the motherhood narrative
Lately, reading Susan Olding’s book Pathologies (and in particular, her essays about infertility and her daughter’s adoption) and Charlene Diehl’s Out of Grief, Singing (as recommended by Alison Pick), I was struck by how various is the motherhood narrative. And yet the universality of these stories– these women, with their extraordinary experiences of motherhood, managed to articulate so much that I’ve only been gesturing toward since I became pregnant two and a half years ago. Partly because the writing here is so remarkable. This might also be because I’m self-absorbed, and project myself onto everything. But still, how these stories resonated, and also taught me new things about the motherhood experience, added the possibility of additional dimensions to my journey.
I also can’t help thinking about how I would critique Diehl’s memoir if it were a novel– during most of her daughter’s brief life in the NICU, Diehl was suffering from a variety of post-birth complications and hardly saw her before she died. In a stupid workshop, I would insist on moments of connections, on the impossibility of these parallel storylines (mother and baby both in physical trauma), it doesn’t unfold like a story (but then, from what I’ve heard, death rarely does). We have to bend life a certain way to make it work in fiction, but real life doesn’t bend, does it. And how Diehl makes something so beautiful of it still, the unbendingness of real life. There is such generosity in her story, such grace, and though I’ve sobbed off and on today as I’ve read her book, so often I’ve been crying because of the joy.
February 15, 2011
Canada Reads Independently 4: Still Life With June by Darren Greer
The connections between the four books I’ve read so far for Canada Reads Independently are really quite remarkable: each is a book constructed of fragments, truth is always a construction, the truth-teller functions as a creator, and these are books that test the limits of fiction (even Mavis Gallant’s, who calls the Linnet Muir stories “as close to autobiography as fiction can be”).
None of the others do any of these things, however, with quite as much unbridled nerve as Darren Greer’s novel Still Life With June. Greer’s narrator Cameron Dodds is an unsuccessful writer (“a loser who knows he’s a loser”: do note how such an admission clears a guy of so much responsibility) who publishes under a variety of pen names, including “Darren Greer”. Cameron works nights at a Salvation Army Treatment Centre (where he’s carved out a niche for himself– he’s the gay guy who breaks up brawls by standing in the middle and screeching songs from “Annie”), whose clients he mines for their stories. He attends a writers group at a local bookstore where he never speaks, and certainly the other writers’ stories are of no use to him, but the stories of the writers themselves are gold to him, these poor pathetic people wasting their time.
He’s a story vampire, so desperate for his next fix that he breaks into the file of a client, Darrel Greene, a former addict who recently committed suicide, and discovers that he had a sister, institutionalized with Down’s Syndrome, who Darrel felt guilty about never taking care of. Cameron decides to pretend to be Darrel, connects with the sister, June, and discovers depth to his character in the process. At the same time, he also forms a relationship with a woman from his writing group who has a few aliases of her own, and a troubled relationship with her brother (who is Cameron’s upstairs neighbour).
There are weaknesses in the plot, but Greer has structured his book to escape all scrutiny. For example, Cameron reports that he’s “not really sure why” he decides to go and meet Darrel’s sister June, which is the sort of flimsy construction I can’t stand, but events transpire at end of the story to reveal that there’s more to the story than that. This happens several times in the text actually, when I thought the plot was lost, and then Greer revealed another trick up his sleeve.
June’s character also remains decidedly two-dimensional, though Cameron is upfront about his/Darrel’s inability to imagine the world through her eyes– to show her as anything more than this would be a violation of Cameron’s perspective. She’s two-dimensional for a reason, but yes, that two-dimensionality has a purpose, but sometimes I wonder if we’re letting the book get away with too much.
I was also uncomfortable with the language here, the use of the word “retard”, and it all got a bit Huck Finn on me. And yes, those of us with purely literary intentions can argue context, but I sometimes wonder if those to whom these words are personal have something to teach the rest of us. That there is more to life than literature, perhaps, and that some of us who love words best are blissfully ignorant as to their power, to how they work. So yes, I was uncomfortable, but I also think that I was supposed to be, and that Greer draws parallels between “retard” and “faggot” that made me thing the term wasn’t flung as randomly as Cameron Dodds presented it as being. I think the whole book was an exercise in uncomfortable-making anyway.
Anyway, the whole thing came together marvelously for me in the end, and though much about the book remained ambiguous, I was satisfied– all the right questions were answered, and I was content to let the others go in a way I wasn’t as happy with in Truth and Bright Water. It was a bleak book, but with passages of levity (whose big box bookstore setting also made me think of a very different book, Corey Redekop’s Shelf Monkey, which I also enjoyed). And it was a book that surprised me time and time again, and always just when I thought it couldn’t surprise me anymore.
Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Still Life With June by Darren Greer
2) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King
3) Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
4) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
February 14, 2011
Renter's Blues
No, just kidding. There are no blues, as I’m a renter by choice, and we made that choice because buying a house would mean I’d have to get a full-time job while (however conversely) we’d then be broke, and also living somewhere that wasn’t here. But I have renting on my mind today after reading Beautiful Anomaly, Lauren Kirshner’s amazing essay in Taddle Creek about the Sylvan Apartments, which became more and more boarded up every time I walked by them on my way to the grocery store in 2005/6, back when we lived at College and Ossington. I’d always wondered what their story was, and what a spectacular way to discover it.
From Kirshner’s piece: “In the end, the Sylvan is less a ghost story than a relic from an era when renting didn’t have to be a compromise [emphasis is mine]. The building gave working people amenities usually associated with home ownership. It was a place where people lived well even if they weren’t well off—an idyll that likely will never again be possible for the average renter in downtown Toronto.”
Which is something to think about. And it got me thinking also about what was perhaps my favourite part of Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians: “In Toronto, the word home was still spelled h-o-u-s-e, and anyone who lived in an apartment by choice, and more particularly an apartment downtown, was considered eccentric if not unstable. On Park Avenue in New York, you were told, it was all right to live in an apartment. But in Toronto it was different. In Toronto, if you were stable, you lived in a house. Your Dun and Bradstreet rating was helped considerably if you owned a house, even if, as was usually the case, the mortgage company could put forward a much better claim to stability in this context that you could.”
February 13, 2011
Doubleness and Happiness
Oh, the things I could tell you about my daughter. Like how she strums her guitar and sings the song she wrote, which is the word “Bunny” over and over; how she learned to say “CN Tower” last week; how when I say, “Slow snow falling”, she says “Deep”, and when I say, “Cars dogs babies”, she says, “Sleep”. How she says “sleep” like “seep” and does a fair amount of it herself. How she’s totally into colouring these days, and she has learned to say her name, except she says, “Ohra” instead of Harriet. Her favourite colour is purple (thanks to Mable Murple), she has to have a sticker on her hand at all times (and best if it’s purple), she loves The Wheels on the Bus (in particular “Swish swish swish”) and Skinnamarink. She loves any book by Marisabina Russo, and Alfie and his sister Annie Rose. How much fun she has with her best friend Margaret, especially when they’re being silly together (and seriously, is it ever fun to wear playdough on your ears.
We love love love her (except when she is having a tantrum at the ROM, and arching her back as I try to put her into her stroller so that the stroller rolls across the atrium at top-speed and everybody is staring at me as she’s screaming, and then we go through the same routine later that afternoon in front of a packed waiting room at the doctor’s). Just as I loved loved loved Sarah Hampson’s wonderful piece in The Globe last week about parenthood and happiness. Which I read with Carol Shields on my mind, and it underlined the line I’d already actually underlined from the novel: “doubleness clarifie[s] the world.” Yes, that’s precisely what it is.
Having a child is very much like everything about being a person who is alive: it’s wonderful and it’s terrible. It’s also very much like being alive in the sense that I’d rather do it than not do it, even though sometimes it isn’t very fun.
I loved this, from Hampson: “I realized that while it was hard not to compare my efforts to those of other mothers, I should see my approach to parenthood as an investment in penny stocks no could predict the outcome of.”
These days, as things have come together in a way that makes sense to me, I spend much less time thinking about “parenting” than I did a year ago. I was obsessed with books then, trying to discover some kind of methodology, but lately we’ve been doing just fine at “making it up as we go along”. Though I have put a book called Toddler Taming on reserve at the library. I have a feeling now is just the calm before the storm.
February 10, 2011
My postal phantom receives a letter from the Undeliverable Mail Office
Kyo Maclear’s 2007 novel The Letter Opener is about a woman who works at Canada Post’s Undeliverable Mail Office in Scarborough, and as I am a postal enthusiast, I devoured the book with delight. I also really enjoyed Maclear’s essay in the back of the book about “Postal Phantoms”– those people who inhabited your home before you and whose mail you continue to receive for years and years. How you come to understand these people’s characters through the return addresses, and they become so familiar that it would almost be disappointing if you one day encountered your postal phantom in the flesh. (I wrote about my own postal phantoms in this post, back in 2008.)
So worlds collided today when my current postal phantom received a letter from the Undeliverable Mail Office! (This phantom is not mentioned in my other post, because I’ve moved since that post was written and left Amanda Lee Hickman behind. In fact, no doubt Amanda Lee and I are now postal phantom-ing it together back at my former address.) I wanted to call up Kyo Maclear and tell her all about it, because it’s really quite remarkable– this means that my postal phantom is out there in the postal phantom netherworld sending mail to undeliverable addresses. What a menace this guy is!
The root of most of his problems, I think, is that his old/my address is still on his cheques, which was how the Undeliverable Mail Office tracked him down (misleadingly) to my house. The whole thing makes me feel quite sorry for that postal employee (and in my head it was Maclear’s Naiko) who took care to open his envelope, redirect his letter, and even include a standard notice about why she had to open his mail that ends with a happy face and the message, “We care”. She must have felt so satisfied, tracing this piece of mail (with no return address, mind you. My postal phantom is so careless!) back to its owner, and I hope she never realizes that she’s only sent it further amiss.
And yes, I do open my postal phantom’s mail. We have been in this relationship long enough that I feel like his letters are really for me. Now I may have to track down the actual person behind the phantom, because it would only be responsible. But then I’d also have to explain why I’ve been opening his mail, which might get a little bit awkward.
*I recently read Maclear’s picture book Spork. It’s awesome.
February 10, 2011
She still fits into that damn doll stroller
“There was a little kid, maybe three of four, walking down Main Street by herself with a doll’s stroller strapped to her butt. Every few steps she’d stop and sit down in it for a rest and then get back up and keep walking.
From the back all I could see was the stroller and two little legs. I wondered what she was thinking. I wonder what three-year-olds think. I wonder if somebody had told her she was too big for that stroller. I wonder if she felt the way I did about people who told you something that you knew was just not fuckin’ true and if she felt like screaming at them and hurting them and plunging herself into a chemically induced oblivion.
I admired this kid for keeping her cool. She just strapped herself into that doll stroller and took of walking, probably without a word. All the way down Main Street. She’ll show the whole town that no, in fact, she still fits into that damn doll stroller.”
–from Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, which I’m reading for the first time. I quote this because last night it made me laugh until I cried.
