January 11, 2010

A recent bookish intersection

“It is past midnight. One of the joys of marriage, thinks Roger, is this late night dissection of events in the privacy of bed, and the glorious intimacy, when the rest of the world is locked out and only you and she exist.”

–from Penelope Lively’s novel Family Album
**
all day

i wait all day
for these ten minutes
awake in our bed,
your minted breath,
lick of dark
across my eyelids,
and the little clicks
your glasses make
as they’re folded
and set on the nightstand

— from Kerry Ryan’s collection The Sleeping Life

January 11, 2010

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

I was confused every time I came across the name “Louisa” in Harriet Reisen’s biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Woman. Louisa? Who was this “Louisa”? For I was reading about Jo, wild, topsey-turvey, irrepressible Jo March, of course. Jo, whose identity was claimed by Alcott unabashedly, because her fiction was an amalgam of her own experiences and dreams of better things. That Louisa May Alcott had to tone reality down a bit to make Jo’s story believable, however, means that her biography is bound to be devourable. And in the most capable hands of Harriet Reisen (who writes like a novelist), the book most certainly is.

Admittedly, as Alcott’s biographer, Reisen did have certain advantages. Louisa May Alcott left quite a paper trail, of journals and scribblings, and an enormous volume of work produced over a very prodigious career. She annotated her own journals over time. Her parents, siblings and many associates all kept journals throughout their lives. She was associated with characters such as Thoreou and Emerson who themselves are objects of great interest. And Reisen is following in the footsteps of other Alcott biographers whose literary sleuthing resulted in the uncovering of Alcott’s pulp fiction and thrillers that were published under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard.

Reisen’s other advantage was that Louisa May Alcott was absolutely fascinating. The daughter of famed Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott (who Reisen contends made his greatest fame on the back of his novelist daughter’s reputation), a peer of Thoreau and Emerson, Louisa grew up in a family guided by his eccentric whims. These whims make a storied tale, though their result was that the Alcotts were frequently destitute, desperate, much in debt, so that the four daughters had to work for a living from a very young age, constrasting them much from their mother’s socially prominent Boston family.

Work, which became the name of one of Alcott’s autobiographical novels, is one of the most interesting themes of her life. Seeking independence from and support for her family, she work as an invalid’s companion, as a teacher, a governess, as a seamstress– “Needlework offered one great advantage over teaching: ‘Sewing won’t make my fortune, but I can plan my stories while I work, and then scribble ’em down on Sundays.'” She served a nurse in the American Civil War, which was the subject of her book Hospital Sketches. And yes, she wrote, exhaustingly– children’s stories, fairy tales, thrillers and lurid tales, novels and sketches, and short stories– earning enough to support herself, which Reisen notes was as rare for a writer then as it is today.

Of course, Louisa was not exactly Jo. Reisen reports of fans that flocked to her house and were disappointed “(sometimes to the point of tears) to find an old curmudgeon instead of spunky Jo”. Alcott was subject to extreme moods, periods of ill health, and the positive outlook so prized by the Marches was more easily aspired to than attained. Her own childhood experiences had been mined of their most extreme hardship before appearing in Little Women, she’d given Jo a different type of father, the March family’s was a much more just kind of world.

But Jo she was, nonetheless, just as her older sister Anna signed fan letters as “Meg”– noting that she lacked Meg’s good looks, but Louisa had decided that “someone had to the beauty”. Louisa may have even referred to herself as “Jo” in her journals, or else her first biographer had made the error whilst transcribing the journals, which is emblematic of how the fact and fiction began to further blur.

Which means that Reisen had some literary sleuthing of her own to perform, and she did turn up long-lost transcripts of interviews Alcott’s neice Lulu (who was one of the last living people to have known the author). Having such an enormous number of resources at her disposal must certainly have been an advantage, but to pick and choose and then join them so seamlessly would have been no mean feat, and Reisen proves herself up to the task. To have brought Alcott to life, in such vivid Jo-ishness is a remarkable achievement, a credit to the subject, and the whole book is absolute marvelous and inspiring to read.

January 11, 2010

Tricks of Perspective

It’s a strange trick of perspective, and I can never quite figure it out: is Harriet tiny or enormous? It changes from moment to moment, day to day. And I do like this picture, because I so rarely get to see her from a distance, for the individual person she is and will grow to be, as opposed to my forever appendage. She truly is one of the funniest and most interesting people I have ever met, through her staying-asleep skills are appalling. But how I admire her excellent posture and her perfectly round head.

Bookishly, my books to-be-read seem much less overwhelming today, mostly because I cleaned my house this week. I am not sure why there is a link between the two, but I’ll take ease wherever I can find it. And in a similar trick of perspective to the paragraph above, I am now reading Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch, because I’m altogether intrigued about what a novel would be were it written by the author of Kisses Kisses Baby-O (one of our favourite bedtime board books). And so far, it’s as marvelous as expected.

I discovered Fitch had written an adult novel when it made the longlist for Canada Also Reads, The Afterword‘s response to CBC Canada Reads. It’s an intriguing list, packed with many books I’ve loved before, including The Incident Report, Stunt, Come Thou, Tortoise, Girls Fall Down, Coventry, February, Cloud of Bone, Too Much Happiness, The Killing Circle, Bang Crunch, and Yellowknife. Looking forward to seeing the shortlist.

January 9, 2010

The Girl Who Hated Books

January 8, 2010

A bit overwhelming

“Maybe–“, I said to my husband last evening. And then I couldn’t go on, because to do so would be to put a name to the problem that mustn’t be named (or at least not by me. Husband names it frequently, which is the problem). But I can’t hold it in anymore: “Maybe there are too many books in my life at the moment.” Because it’s gotten a bit overwhelming. Would be less so if I could stop requesting books from the library all the time, and if the Toronto Public Library holdings didn’t contain every one of my heart’s desires. (I am now hold 34 of 161 for Patrick Swayze’s autobiography. Yes, I too am not sure if this is really necessary).

I am currently reading Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen. I’ve also been reading the poetry collection The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan, which is pretty wintry so far, so it feels like the right book for now, though my life hasn’t been very sleeping for a long time. Progress is slow on the Alcott book, which is no matter on one hand because the book is very good, but then I’ve got such a backlog of books waiting. Like the Canada Reads: Independently books, which I’m going to start shortly. Beginning with Ray Smith’s Century, I think, because that is the one I’m most scared of.

And to make up for the dullness of this post, I give you a glimpse of me and technology circa 1987.

January 6, 2010

On my newfound trekker, newfound confidence, and the mystery of defensive mothering

Oh, if I could go back seven months, what a lot of things I’d have to say to the me I was then. I would urge that shattered, messed up girl to, “Get thee to a lactation consultant” a week sooner than I actually did, and advocate better for myself and baby whilst in the hospital, and promise myself that life as we knew it was not gone, gone, gone forever more.

I would also tell myself to run out and buy a Baby Trekker. I know why we didn’t in the first place– I thought Baby Bjorn was the end in baby carriage, but that $150 was too pricey. Since then, I’ve learned that you get your money’s worth, and that Bjorn’s not where it’s at anyway. We’ve had the Trekker for about three weeks now, and I’ve used it every day (it’s snowsuit friendly!), whether to haul Harriet around the neighbourhood, or to cook dinner with her happily strapped to my back (and this has improved our quality of life more than I can ever describe).

If I could go back about six months, I’d tell myself to START PUTTING THE BABY TO BED EARLY. That she doesn’t have “a fussy period between 7:00 and bedtime”, but that she’s screaming for us to put her to bed then. Of course, I wouldn’t have believed myself then, and even once we’d figured it out, it took another six weeks to learn how to actually get it done. This, like everything, was knowledge we had to come to on our own. And most of motherhood is like that, I’ve found, and it seems to be for my friends as well, which is why all my well-meaning, hard-earned advice is really quite useless to them. But even knowing that we have it in us to do so, to figure it out, I mean, is certainly something worth pointing out.

Even more useful than my Trekker, I think, the best piece of baby equipment I’ve acquired lately is confidence. I had reservations with Naomi Stadlen’s book, but she was right about this: “If [the new mother] feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her.” Though it actually was the bookshelves of literature that showed me I could go my own way, mostly due to the contradictory advice by “authorities” in each and every volume. (Oh, and I also read Dreambabies, which made it glaringly obvious that baby expertise is bunk.)

Solid food was the turning point though. I have three baby food cookbooks and they’re all reputable, and each is good in its own way, but they agree on nothing. When to start solids, what solids to start on, and when/how to introduce other foods, and on and on. It was good, actually, because I found that whenever I wanted to feed the baby something, at least one of the books would give me permission to do so. So I decided to throw all the rules out the window, and as teaching Harriet to enjoy food as much as I have the power to do so is important to me, I decided we would make up our own rules. As we’ve no history of food allergies in our families, and Harriet is healthy, we opted not to systematize her eating. We’ve fed her whatever we’ve taken a fancy to feeding her, without rhyme or reason, including blueberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, toast, cheese, beans, chickpeas, smoothies, squash, broccoli, spinach, spaghetti, and cadbury’s chocolate, and she’s devoured it all.

Okay, I lied about the chocolate. But the point is that my instincts told me that this was the best way to feed our baby, what made the most sense, and so I tried it and we’re all still alive. And it was liberating to know that the baby experts could be defied– I really had no idea that was even allowed. That as a mother, there could be something I knew about my child and our family that an entire panel of baby experts didn’t. And we can go onward from there.

What has surprised me, however, is that confidence hasn’t done much to reduce my defensive-mothering. You know, feeling the need to reassert oneself whenever someone makes different choices that you do. How not going back to work, for example, makes me feel like a knob, and moms going back to work feel threatened that I’m not, and we keep having to explain ourselves to the other, in fitful circles that take us nowhere.

It’s not just working vs. not working, of course. It’s everything, and this past while I figured it was my own lack of confidence that was making me so defensive. The best advice I’ve received lately is, “Never be too smug or too despairing, because someone else is doing better and worse than you are.” And it was good to keep in mind that any residual smugness was due to probably due to feelings of inadequacy anyway.

Anyway, it’s not just inadequacy, inferiority. Even the decisions I feel confident about prompt defensiveness when other mothers do differently, and now not because I’m unsure of myself, but because I’m so damn sure of myself that I’m baffled when you don’t see it the way I do. And there’s this line we’re meant to spout in these sorts of situations, to imply a lack of judgement. We’re meant to say, about our choices: “It’s what’s best for our family”, but that’s the most sanctimonious load of crap I’ve ever heard. Some things, yes, like me not going back to work, are best for our family, but other things, the other “choices” we’ve made: I’d prescribe them to everyone, and that not everyone is lining up for my prescriptions drives me absolutely mad.

Mom-on-mom action continues to fascinate, nonetheless. There are politics like nothing else, like nothing in the world of men, I think. It brings out the best and the worst in me, and I don’t think I’m the only one. And I doubt the action is going to be letting up anytime soon.

January 6, 2010

Avocado mishaps and literary avocados

A mishaps during Sunday’s trip to the grocery store led to me bringing home ten avocados when I really only meant to buy one, and so it’s avocado city here these days, as we seek to use them up before they get riper than ripe (read: rotten). Which is sort of easy, because we have a baby, and avocados are nature’s baby food, but even she doesn’t need that much avocado, so we’ve also been indulging in avocado milkshakes, avocado pizza, avocado scones, and my new favourite discovery– avocado bread, which might just be the best thing in the universe. I’ve adapted the recipe as per the reviewer’s comment to add a bit more sugar, and then I forget about the sugar and pretend that this is a healthy treat, because avocado is the good fat, after all.

So the point is that I’m totally obsessed with avocados, and have been thinking about bookish ones. I remembered this piece from the London Review of Books about Californian agriculture and avocado orchards: “Avocados have always been the icon of San Diego’s countryside (which produces much of the US harvest) and if the remaining growers are forced to sell out, the past will become as inaccessible as the future will be combustible.”

In terms of books, there is Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (which I once wrote about here). The famously dirty Wetlands that had an avocado on its cover. We have a picture book called Avocado Baby by John Burningham. I wrote a poem about avocados during my Poetic April back in 2008. Googling, I found this ode to the avocado by Richard Wireck in a literary journal called r.kv.r.y. “O Avocado Avocado”, in which the author asked to be slathered, buried “in God’s sweet, gold pudding, the very butter of paradise.” And YA author called Daniel Pinkwater wrote a book called The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. A further web search brings me to Avocado: Botany, Production and Uses, which sounds a bit boring, and Sex and the Avocado, which sounds less so, until you realize it’s written by the author of 105-Plus Guacamole Dip Recipes.

Which is nowhere near enough. What other literary avocados am I missing? Forgive me for not coming up with more on my own, but I’ve got another loaf to bake.

January 5, 2010

L.M. Montgomery and The Blythes are Quoted

My Quill & Quire review of Jane Urquhart’s Extraordinary Canadians: LM Montgomery and Montgomery’s The Blythes are Quoted (edited by Benjamin Lefebvre) is now posted online. I enjoyed both of these books immensely, and found The Blythes are Quoted fascinating to consider as a example of Montgomery’s work in progress, though perhaps not a typical one as this book has something of a peculiar genesis. And the Urquhart biography is wonderful– as enlightening as Mary Rubio’s but in an accessible package for a more casual read. There is so much about Montgomery her readers don’t know, and how much richer is her writing once they do.

Anyway, my review is here.

January 5, 2010

Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly

As I received this book for Christmas and read it over a couple of days of bookish holiday bliss, my brain is far too mushy in regards to it for a formal review, but I don’t want to miss my chance to let you know how wonderful it is. I read Karen Connelly’s novel The Lizard Cage in 2007, it’s stayed with me ever since, and it made a Burma a place that’s important in my mind. I certainly thought of Teza as I read news coverage of the Saffron Revolution later that year (which was not really a revolution in the end, but for a while it was the promise of something). Connelly’s novel was formidable in and of itself, but that a Canadian woman had managed to so well articulate the story of a male Burmese political prisoner was quite remarkable.

Connelly’s new book Burmese Lessons is partly the story of how she came to write The Lizard Cage. I say “partly”, because Burmese Lessons is “about” many things, strands of experience from that time in Connelly’s life, plaited together in a gorgeous construction. The book is subtitled “A Love Story”, and much of it is the story of Connelly’s love affair with Maung, a Burmese dissident guerrilla fighter. But theirs is not the only “love story”, strictly speaking. In the book, Connelly writes of her effusive love for the whole world, this one country in particular, and every corner of it, and its language and its people, and its beauty, and she seeks an understanding of its ugliness too. Her passion resonates throughout the text, whether she is describing the people she sees, the food she eats, those she conflicts with, the politics of Burma, the situation on the Thai-Burmese border, or sex with Maung (and there is much of the last one). Burmese Lessons is very much a story of the body, of sex, of violence she witnesses inflicted upon Burmese protesters, of the sick children she sees who are dying of malaria, of her own experience with malaria, of living in the jungle and not having a bowel movement for days and days and days. Connelly holds nothing back here, and her passion is clear with every line.

As well as a novelist, Connelly is a poet and a non-fiction writer, and her prose demonstrates such deftness. After more than a decade dealing with Burmese politics, she also knows her stuff, and holds nothing back either regarding the brutality of the Burmese junta, the realities of life in the Burmese refugee camps in Thailand, and the violence that human beings enact toward one another. This is not an easy book by any means, but its various strands are entwined so as to counter heavy with light, to enlighten and enliven, to make reading the whole thing in a day or two a serious delight.

If you haven’t read The Lizard Cage, you really should. And then when you’re finished with that, read this to find out everything else, what Connelly couldn’t hope to contain in her other book. Which is to say that Burmese Lessons is a serving of leftovers of a sort, but it would have been a sin to have them go to waste.

January 4, 2010

My Canada Reads: Independently Reactions

First, I’m glad my excitement has been a little contagious, or maybe this books list is just really good, because I’ve received a fantastic response to the Canada Reads: Independently lineup. I’m pleased that quite a few readers will be reading along with some or all of the picks, and I look forward to comparing responses.

I’m pretty pleased with the range of books we’ve got here. Of course, the list is stacked with books by men called Ray, but that’s just par for the course, isn’t it? Men not called Ray are always excluded from this sort of thing. I’ve only read one book from the list before (How Happy to Be) but I read it for fun and didn’t review it, so to look at it a bit more critically will be a different experience. It is worth noting, of course, that my “celebrity panelists” are all friends of mine in some capacity, but I figured, who better than friends to ask for a favour? And finally, that the panel is entirely constructed of bookish people, which was quite deliberate, for the same reason I don’t get my hair cut at the dentist.

We’re friends of Biblioasis here at Pickle Me This (and friends of friends of Biblioasis), so it’s not a big surprise that they’ve got two books on the list. Dan Wells is the publisher of Biblioasis and he’s championing his own book, which might constitute a conflict of interest, but I decided that was fine. For really, what is more of a conflict of interest than loving a book, and isn’t that the very point? If Dan liked Century enough to publish it, isn’t that just another way of him saying that he really likes it a lot?

Being the Canada Reads Indies, we bent the rules to our heart’s content. Dan touts his own book, Patricia Storms brings a book of stories to the table, and Rona Maynard’s book I’ve already read. Happily, happily, anything goes, and I think the list is better for it.

My aim is to get through these by March, to post reviews on my site as I read them, to rate the books against one another, and then the week after Canada Reads is broadcast in March to reflect on these books in relation to one another, and to other peoples’ reaction to them.

Should you wish to read along, go here for details on purchasing Hair Hat, and the other books are available on Amazon or your local independent bookstore. And how nice to suppose that I won’t be reading so independently after all.