October 20, 2010
Harriet has a meta moment
Okay, I’ll admit to not being exactly capitivated by the plots, but 17 month old Harriet is absolutely obsessed with the Hello Baby Board Book series by Jorge Uzon. These books have only lived in our house for a very short period, but Harriet keeps taking them off the shelf and demanding they be read to her. When she isn’t demanding they be read to her, she is struggling to walk around the house holding all four books at the very same time. Clearly, Uzon has found an audience for his beautiful photography.
Our favourite part of all the books, however, is in Go Baby, Go! when the baby discovers another baby within the pages of his book. And the amazing thing about this is that he has discovered the Night Cars* baby! We love Night Cars, and pointing to the baby (who, when he finally falls asleep, has an adorable tendency to stick his bum into the air) is Harriet’s favourite part of the book (except for the fire truck). So to see the baby in her book pointing to the baby in her book, and then to point to that baby herself– I think Harriet is discovering that the bounds between fiction and reality are ever-blurry. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
*Do you know Night Cars? The absolutely gorgeous urban bedtime book by Teddy Jam, who was aka the late novelist Matt Cohen? I bought this book for Harriet when I was four months pregnant, and signed the inside cover “from Mommy and Daddy”, which was kind of amazing then. And still is. Its rhymes punctuate our days– “Garbage man, garbage man, careful near that dream. It could gobble up your garbage truck, and then where would you be?” Also notable for being a book about *Daddy*. And donuts.
Anyway, I didn’t know this book either until I heard Esta Spalding reading it as part of Seen Reading’s Readers Reading almost two years ago. And I am very glad I did.
October 19, 2010
Two books I bought today
Harriet is receiving The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My for Christmas this year, after a recommendation from Charlotte. The book is published in English by the Drawn & Quarterly children’s imprint Enfant, and is really, truly a work of art. It is our introduction to Moominism, and if this book is any indication, I think I’m in love. The drawings are vivid, whimsical, and easy to get lost in, and the characters crawl through the story through a different hole in every page. I am also obsessed with the typography, and the translation from Swedish which still seems to rhyme absolutely perfectly. I look forward to reading this one to pieces.
Also, tonight I made the world’s shortest appearance 
at Amy Lavender Harris‘ book launch in order to congratulate her and pick up a long-awaited copy of Imagining Toronto. An expansive and almost exhaustive study of how Toronto has been rendered in its literature, how this city we know so well has been imagined by its writers. Harris writes, “Toronto is a city of stories that accumulate in fragments between the aggressive thrust of its downtown towers and the primordial dream of the city’s ravines. In these fragments are found narratives of unfinished journeys and incomplete arrivals, chronicles of all the violence, poverty, ambition and hope that give shape to this city and the lives laid down in it.”
October 19, 2010
Notables: Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf
May/June 2005 was certainly an exciting time in the history of the universe– Penguin Books had just turned 70, and I was about to get married. These two occasions colliding one day on Oxford Street in London where I happened to be shopping for a wedding dress, and had stopped into a Waterstones where Priscilla Presley was scheduled to be appearing. Though I was devastated to discover that we’d shown up for Priscilla precisely one day late, so I never got to see her promoting her new book. Instead, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting, a gorgeous little volume (for 1 pound fifty!) that had been published as part of Penguin’s birthday celebration.
So it’s not an especially rare book, or an old one, but it’s notable to me. It contains six examples of Woolf’s essays and short fiction, which blur the lines between the two particularly. And to be honest, I would have had an impossible time ever cracking this book and getting through its 56 page had I a month later not happened to sign up for a course in Woolf’s essays and short fiction at UofT where I was to begin graduate studies in September. Woolf’s essays and short fiction meaning nothing to me previously– I’d bought the book because I liked the idea of Woolf more than I really understood her work, and I’d signed up for the course because it was the only Woolf-course available.
My performance in the course was positively dismal, and if you never see me in graduate school again (which, I assure you, you won’t!), the challenges I faced in that course are all the reasons why. If by challenges, of course, you mean the brick wall I kept banging my head against in an attempt to understand academic theory, which, oddly enough, no one had ever mentioned to me during my undergraduate career, or just my efforts to get along in grad school life in general, which met with very poor results. Grad school taught me that I’m really not cut out for grad school, BUT, I learned so very much along the way. Like how to read Virginia Woolf, and that changed everything.
Because I found that her essays and short fiction really are the key to understanding her larger projects, and the foundations behind them. From reading her book reviews, and her Common Reader essays, and her short stories, I found myself positively immersed in her work, and my general academic stupidity aside, I became fluent in Woolf. I understand Woolfian arguments now, and how they turn and wobble, and the straight path was never her intention, so if you get confused reading Virginia Woolf, it’s because you’re supposed to.
And I couldn’t have learned any of this all on my own– if I’d taken a break from wedding planning during that day to read Street Haunting as I was swept along with the Oxford Street tide, I would have found myself baffled and disappointed. I would have read all that weirdness and thought the problem was me. I was sorely in need of a little guidance to illuminate just what was going on, and never mind that that guidance was just showing me the door out of academia, but en route, oh what I learned as I shuffled to the exit.
I learned to read Virginia Woolf— because there’s a knack to it, of course. It’s hard and weird, but infinitely rewarding, and the universe is a more mesmerizing place for it. I could pick up a copy of Street Haunting now and follow its meanderings for hours.
So I like this book because it’s a souvenir, and also because I learned to read Virginia Woolf is another way of saying I have lived.
October 18, 2010
The Journey Prize Stories 22
In the Canadian literary circles I tune into, everybody bitches about everything. It’s sort of a standard rule. Which makes it notable, I think, that I’ve never heard anybody complain about the dearth of a thriving literary magazine culture in this country. That I’ve never heard a writer tell me that they’d had it with Canadian lit. mags, and now they’re sending everything to some address in New York City or London. That L.A. is where the bucks are. Though no one ever says that here is where the bucks are either, but the bucks are not the point. Though they should be. Why aren’t they? And probably we could all start bitching about that.
We take these magazines for granted, however. These little outfits all over the country, often driven by volunteers, undersubscribed but over submitted to. Whose funding was cut by the Federal Government a while back, remember? These magazines that have provided stellar platforms from which our best writers have launched their careers. Magazines that readers like me have fallen in love with, and thrill to see in my mail box about four times a year.
Of course, I go on about small magazines all the time. I also spend a lot of time celebrating the short story, and the fantastic work being created in the genre by new Canadians writers. And I realize that this all can be a bit overwhelming– what magazine to read? What writers? What stories? How to get a feel for any of this? So I am very happy to answer all these questions with The Journey Prize Stories 22.
Each year, Canadian literary magazines submit their best short fiction for The Journey Prize, which was founded in 1988 when writer James Michener donated the Canadian royalties of his novel Journey. This year’s judges were Pasha Malla, Joan Thomas and Alissa York, and they culled the list down to 12 stories which appear here. The collection was a pleasure to read, an exciting sampling of the diverse forces at work in Canadian short fiction, and an example of the amazing talent being spotted and fostered by our smaller magazines.
The three stories selected for the shortlist were all deserving– Krista Foss’ “The Longitude of Okay” is a gripping story of a school shooting incident and its aftermath, fiercely plotted, and sparsely drawn with perfect detail. Devon Code’s “Uncle Oscar” is told from the perspective of a young boy who is privy to disorder all around him, and orders that disorder in his own way. That young boy’s perspective never falters. And finally, Lynne Katsukake’s “Mating” takes place in Japan, where a husband is reluctantly supporting his wife in a an effort to find a wife for their son, and the narrative is a subtle meditation on family, love and parenthood.
For me, other standouts in the bunch were Laura Boudreau’s “The Dead Dad Game”, which is also a young person’s perspective on a broken world, and that world is realized with such humour, poignancy and quirky charm. Ben Lof’s “When In the Field With Her at His Back” is a disorienting story with all of itself encapsulated within its very first sentence, and yet it manages to be surprising. I loved Andrew McDonald’s “Eat Fist”, in which a young Ukrainian-Canadian math prodigy’s language lessons from a female weight lifter blossoms into her very first love affair. Eliza Robertson’s “Ship’s Log” is the story of a young boy who’s digging a hole to China, perhaps to escape from a home where everything has gone awry, and the gaps in this playful narrative are particularly devastating to great effect. Mike Spry’s “Five Pounds Short With Apologies to Nelsen Algren” begins, “No one ever tells you not to fuck the monkey…” and goes from there, and never falls over its feet with its furious pace.
As I read this collection, I tried to think of a way to link the stories, to find a way to talk about them all together in a review, but they each read so differently, and I never figured out how. But now I see that the small magazine thing was the underlining factor all along anyway– incredible stuff is happening here. And if you want to add your support to a really thriving culture, The Journey Prize Stories is a good place to start.
October 15, 2010
Vote vote vote for The Girls Who Saw Everything
Remember when I was 40 weeks pregnant and obsessed with Sean Dixon’s The Girls Who Saw Everything? I sure do, and even with everything that’s happened since, I’m still pretty obsessed with it. And Stuart also enjoyed it, and he’s quite a different kind of reader than I am, so that says something about this book’s appeal. Anyway, when asked to champion a Canadian book from the last ten years as a candidate for CBC Canada Reads 2011, The Girls… came to my mind immediately. Because, as I told the good people at the CBC:
it’s challenging, literary, fun, plot-driven, ripe with allusions, a good read even if you don’t get the allusions, a book about girls that’s written by a man, because it’s a celebration of bookishness, and because it’s about the most bizarre book club you could ever imagine.
October 15, 2010
There is no other way
“Nevertheless, Friedan raised a critical point: “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” What Friedan understood, but what many of us ultimately forgot, is that simply landing a job does not guarantee self-actualization. At the same time, the homemaker who simply learns to cook dinner, keep a garden and patch blue jeans will probably not find deep fulfillment either. Those who do not seriously challenge themselves with a genuine life plan, with the intent of taking a constructive role in society, will share the same dangers as the housewives who suffered under the mystique of feminine fulfillment; they face what Friedan called a “nonexistent future”.”– Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes
October 14, 2010
New kids books we've been enjoying lately
Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy, Illustrated by Polly Dunbar. This book is longer than most that Harriet will sit still for, but I think she gets caught up in the rhythm of the language. Mahy goes to enormous stretches to create her rhymes, resulting in a splendidly absurd vocabulary, all kinds of new words, nonsense rhymes but not so nonsensical, imagine if Dr. Seuss had employed a thesaurus. The story is about a small boy who gets caught up in a bubble blown by his big sister Mabel, and floats up above the town setting his small town into crisis. Soon, the neighbours are all chasing him as he floats, devising ways to bring him down safely. The illustrations are stylish and whimsical, and I particularly delighted in the Scrabble tiles on the page where “In a garden folly, Tybal and his mother, Sybil/ sat and played a game of Scrabble, shouting shrilly as they scored.”
Good Night Canada I’ll admit it, some of these “Good Night…” books stretch the point a bit, but an entire nation is surely enough to fill up a board book, and I like the way that Canada fills up this one. A nice way for Harriet to learn about parts of our country she has never seen, those that are familiar (“Good morning, streetcars of Toronto!”), and that she even lives in a country at all, and one with symbols– maple leaves, the Parliament buildings, hockey, the Canada flag.
Doggy Slippers Written by Jorge Lujan, Illustrated by Isol. At our house we like Isol, who wrote and illustrated It’s Useful to Have a Duck. Doggy Slippers similarly plays games with perspective, providing children with a child’s-eye view upon their own world. Latin American poet Lujan solicited children for poems and stories about pets, and he turned their responses into the poems in this book. Harriet is still too little to get much out of this book, but I adore the poems– “My turtle, Coco, is happy,/ is green,/ is slow,/ except when she falls/ down the stairs.” Isol’s childlike drawings the perfect accompaniment. I look forward to finding out whether these poems make perfect sense to Harriet, filtered through a child’s eyes as they are, or if she detects anything a little “off” about them. They’ll certainly give us a lot to talk about.
Eats. Written by Marthe Jocelyn. Illustrated by Tom Slaughter. This book is perfect for Harriet’s level, as she recognizes so many of the images that she’ll begin to get the concept. That a giraffe eats leaves, and bears eat fish, and a monkey eats bananas. And then a picture of an ice cream cone, which is Harriet’s favourite food in the world. “And WHO eats ice cream?” Who indeed! Hilarity. We absolutely love this conclusion.
C is for Coco: A Little Chick’s First Book of Letters. Written by Sloane Tanen, Photographed by Stefan Hagen. We love this book! I appreciate alphabet books that include some of our favourite words, like dancer, apple, umbrella and penguin. And good new ones too, for educational purposes (ie “elbow”). The chick is cute and fun, Tanen’s dioramas are adorable, and some of the rhymes aren’t totally brilliant, I’ll forgive them. Harriet likes this book as much as I do, and we’re not sick of it yet.
No. By Claudia Rueda. The book begins with Little Bear’s mother urging him (or her?) to begin preparing for winter, and Little Bear responds with all those familiar excuses. He’s not tired, and he wants to play, and no matter that it’s getting cold– he loves the cold! And with every page, winter gets a bit closer. Soon there is no sign of anyone but Little Bear, and the snow is falling fast and mean– perhaps Little Bear has overestimated his own stamina? When he finds his mother again, he tells he he’s back because he thought she might get lonely without him. But is he telling the truth, we ask ourselves each time we reach this book’s end? It’s a gorgeously illustrated book, with drawings from interesting points of view, and Harriet likes finding Little Bear in the pictures as the snow falls harder and he becomes more difficult to see.
October 14, 2010
On Bolting, and Bolters
One good thing about rereading What Maisie Knew was considering the character of Maisie’s mother, Ida Farange, a rather loathsome woman, and not just because she abandons her daughter after manipulating her or ignoring her for years. At one point, they refer to her “bolting”, to her being a “bolter”. Which made me think of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, which is the story of the Radlett family as narrated by their cousin Fanny. Fanny lives with her cousins because her parents have abandoned her as Maisie’s do (though in a far more light-hearted fashion), and her mother is referred to as “The Bolter”.
Perhaps Bolters were a blip in maternal history, a brief early twentieth century phenomenon amongst the English upper classes. (There is a biography called The Bolter as well, of someone called Idina Sackville). But I think we could actually do with a bit more literary bolting these days, mothers who take off without compunction. It was suggested to me that Alice Munro wrote about bolters, but we decided it didn’t count– her boltings always required sacrifice, but bolting doesn’t, by definition.
It occurred to me early on in motherhood why a mother might leave her children. (Not that I’d leave my children, but I have to say that, don’t I?). Because motherhood is all-or-nothing, overwhelmingly so, and if you discovered you just weren’t cut out for it, that you were terrible at it, and if you had financial means to flee, well then, wouldn’t you have to?
This is all assuming that there are women who just don’t “take” to motherhood, which I think is a healthy idea to be considered because of the number of times it turns out to be true. And I kind of admire the stance of the bolters, who don’t take to motherhood but don’t have to pretend that they do. They don’t have to run away and pretend they’re all torn up about it either. Which isn’t to say that the kids are all right, but maybe they are, or at least they will be, and the bolters don’t care regardless.
Now I’m not advocating bolting itself, though yes, undoubtedly, I’m glamourizing it. But I think these kinds of characters are positive figures in what they represent, in their freedom and their shamelessness. Adding the “bolter” to maternal archetypes, I think, would elevate maternity in general. Those of us who don’t care to bolt might be better mothers for carrying a bit of their spirit within us.
Update: See comment below re. Mrs. Brown who bolted from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. And I just now thought of the mother from Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Replace Your Name, who had her own reasons.
October 14, 2010
On rereading What Maisie Knew
Well, I’ve been defeated. I reread Henry James’ What Maisie Knew, all prepared for that smug “I was so much stupider then, I’m starter than that now” feeling I often receive when I revisit a book I read in university. Because I remember really disliking Maisie when I read it back in Major British Novels or some such second year course, and how in our prof’s lecture notes, every fifth word was “ambiguous”, and I don’t know if I’d ever heard that word before, but by the end of the lecture I hated it. But I’m a better reader now, and I like everything else by Henry James I’ve ever read, and I read this after Room by Emma Donoghue to compare the children’s perspectives. But it just didn’t do it for me.
Of course, it’s not you, it’s me, I say to What Maisie Knew. And I really mean it– somewhere beneath these many-claused sentences, and multi-paged paragraphs, and so much explaining of just what I lost track, there is a really good novel here. The story of a young girl whose parents divorce and use her as a weapon against the other, and then the web is further tangled by step-parents, and other lovers, and a love-sick governess who refuses to do what she is told.
How much does Maisie know? Probably more than she’s meant to, but then I really don’t know. This novel required far more work than I was willing to offer in order to extract just what exactly was going on. Skip half a paragraph, and you’re lost, but reading the character carefully, word-for-word, I was still lost, so what was the point?
This is probably a really remarkable book, but I’m tired and have a head-cold.
