September 20, 2011

Another Belfast Man Doing Well

I found this on the ground on Saturday, and basically think it’s an entire novel condensed to a post-it note. Who is Harry? What kind of job did Steve and Paul do exactly? (I suspect dry-walling). Is Harry the Belfast man doing well? Can we take this to mean that Jim is a fellow well-doing Belfast man, or is he just someone who collects such people? How much is Rosemary really invested in the situation anyway? What was this note stuck to before it was so carelessly discarded? What’s Harry’s connection to Steve and Paul? And could there be any other names as archetypal as Harry, Steve, Paul, and Jim and Rosemary? Is this note not a throwback to a bygone age? Except for the pink post-it, of course. The pink post-it is very much of now.

August 30, 2011

Here be (no) dragons

One day, after ages of it being beloved, Harriet suddenly refused to let me read Sheree Fitch’s Sleeping Dragons All Around. At that point, she was unable to articulate why, but it was still significant as the first time a book had been outright rejected (as opposed to, say, abandoned out of boredom, which is different).

She also wouldn’t let us read her The Lady With the Alligator Purse— we’re still not sure why. But by the time she’d gone off two books as various as Neil Gaiman’s Instructions and Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, I’d started detecting a theme. And by this time, Harriet had the words to explain: “Too scary,” she told us. Apparently it’s a fire-breathing dragon thing.

But how did she discover that dragons were scary? I’d certainly gone out of my way never to mention such a thing. In fact, I’d never mentioned that there was such a thing as “scary” at all, because little people are so open to suggestion, and I’ve been working hard on cultivating fearlessness. I don’t really do “scary” anyway, except when it comes to sensible things like diving off cliffs and tightrope walking. The closest thing I’ve got to an irrational fear is an extreme unease around dogs (which is not so irrational, I’d argue, because they’re equipped with teeth that could chew your face off), but I promise you that around a dog, Harriet has never, ever seen me flinch.

So this dragons thing has brought me to the limits of my powers, my powers of “cultivation”, and I get it that this is only the beginning of a very long education. And I get it too that it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that oversized fire-breathing lizards are probably best left undistubed between covers. (Interestingly, Harriet’s dragon aversion doesn’t extend to dinosaurs. She loves dinosaurs–plush, fossilized, wooden, Edwina, you name it.)

The thing is actually, that I fucking hate books with dragons (some excellent picture books aside). It’s true. I always have– when I was growing up, I never read a single book with a dragon on the cover. Which wasn’t really difficult to accomplish, because there weren’t many books with dragons on the cover. (My YA self would have been horrified by the popularity of science-fiction/fantasy today. And my adult self remains mystified.) A dragon on the cover was a kind of book design shorthand for “boring book for nerds”, and though I was certainly a nerd, I was the type of nerd who preferred books about pretty girls dying of anorexia or getting cancer.

Fantasy books: here’s another place where I’ve come to the limits of my own powers. I just can’t get into them, though I’ve tried. And I think back and wonder if I’d been less dragon-phobic in my youth, maybe fantasy-appreciation would come easier to me. There are a lot of things I wish I’d spent most of my life being a lot more open minded about, hence the reason why I want to make Harriet’s literary horizons broad from the very start. I want her to read better than I did, but then she persists in having her own feelings about things. She persists in refusing to be malleable, in having fears and preferences and in being a person apart from me.

But also a person who is very much like me, which I’m not sure is more or less disconcerting.

August 16, 2011

Baby Lit: Little Miss Austen

Here’s a tip for all you booksellers out there: stock the Baby Lit series, and the books will be snapped up by those of us with more money than brains. (And this is saying something. I don’t actually have that much money.) I don’t even like Pride & Prejudice, but I had to have this gorgeous board book, which is actually more worthwhile than its genius gimmick might suggest. It’s a counting book, P&P from 1-10– 1 English Village (with a green!), 2 handsome gentlemen, 3 houses, etc., and each item cumulates to tell Austen’s story (kind of). The illustrations are lovely, stylishly designed with floral detailing and demask backgrounds– you can see a couple of pages here.

From the publisher’s pages, the series (which, so far, also includes Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t think they die at the end) is “a fashionable way to introduce your toddler to the world of classic literature”. And heaven forbid you introduce your toddler to classic literature in an unfashionable way, or forget to do it until they’ve turned four and it’s already too late.

Qualms aside, the book is cute, and I’m a middle-class white person who lives in the city and buys artisanal cheese. Books like this were made for people like me. What else are you going to do?

August 8, 2011

Going Home Again

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience or returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.” –Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

I don’t get home very often, hardly ever. I’ve never lived in either of the houses where my parents live now, my grandparents’ houses were sold and gutted long ago, the woods behind the house I lived in until I was nine are now so grown-up that you can’t see the house from the road, and I rarely find myself on that road anyway. Wallace Stegner was right. Like Joan Didion, my parents may have wanted to promise me that I would “grow up with a sense of [my] cousins and of rivers and over my great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to [have pledged me] a picnic on a river with fried chicken and [my] hair uncombed, would like to [have given me] home for [my] birthday, but we live differently now.” Which I don’t think is an inconsolable loss, but it’s a loss still, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve been awash is nostalgia this last while. I keep wanting to write essays about how I spent the night of September 11 2001 in Kos at College and Bathurst eating fries with my friends. This comes on because that night was ten years ago, a nice round number, and because I’ve been listening to Dar William’s The Honesty Room, which I bought around the same time. I keep wanting to write essays about riding our bikes in Japan, and our house in England with its dirty lace curtains and the park across the street, and these wouldn’t be essays, really. They would be diary entries, which, according to Sarah Leavitt, are differentiated from memoirs in that in memoirs, the role of the self is to serve the story. In my story, the role of the self would only be to serve the self, pure indulgence. Basically, I’d like to go home again. Which is as impossible as: Basically, I want a time machine.

I try. Sometimes I walk down Dundas Street between Bathurst and Manning, where I lived for a pivotal year at the turn of the century, except that the Chinese herb shop we lived over is now a store where you can buy a $2400 ottoman, and the restaurant at the end of our block burned down last summer. Sometimes I walk through the university campus where I lived when I thought that a push-up bra and blue eyeshadow were key accessories and where the snow fell so high once that the army came and shovelled us out, but it’s too altogether the same and different. We’ve been replaced by new students who sleep in our beds and imagine themselves to be the centre of the universe.

My family has a thing for nostalgia. A favourite pass-time has always been the Driving By Where We Used to Live game, or the Driving by Where We Lived Before You Were Born game. I sometimes still play this, except we don’t have a car, and so we settle for Pushing Your Stroller Past the Old Apartment whenever we’re in Little Italy. My husband thinks this is weird. Partly because he has lived in none of these locations save for one, and so the game to him is a little bit boring. I keep trying to take him home to places he’s never seen in his life which are inhabited by strangers who have painted the garage door and redone the siding. Besides, he grew up in a land so steeped in its history that he was eager to shed the concept entirely with his new life in Canada. He’s had enough of trodding on Roman ruins. He also thinks it’s funny that any Canadian building one hundred years old is worthy of a plaque.

Anyway, the point is that the cottage we’ve stayed at the last two summers is also where the summers of my childhood were spent. Or not the entire summers, but a few weeks of every one, which, interestingly, have gone all metonymic and become the only bits of those summers I remember. So that last week I did get to go home again, to a place so utterly unchanged, but then I am so changed that it’s a new place altogether and I am happy with that, because I certainly don’t want our summer vacation to be one of those drive-by games that makes Stuart exasperated. I want the cottage to be a place for Harriet to discover for herself, just like I did, and she doesn’t need to know that the dock used to be broken and sinking, so slippery that you couldn’t run, where our fort was, and that the beach was wider once upon a time, but the minnows are the same, and so are the leopard frogs. It is easier to walk barefoot on gravel than it used to be, or maybe it’s just that the soles of my feet are just hard.

No one needs to know about the two salient selves I remember from there. The seven year old girl with a side-ponytail performing a choreographed routine to the theme from Jem and the Holograms on top of a picnic table, and the other one even more awkward, if you can believe it. She’s sitting on a swing dreamily, listening to “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” on the yellow Sony Sports Walkman tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her baja jacket. She’s staring at the sunset sparkling on the lake, and she’s thinking of profound things, like boyfriends, and breasts, and one day being so far away that she’ll be able to refer to herself in the third person.

July 22, 2011

In search of a cool breeze

Yesterday, when the temperature “felt like” 50 degrees Celsius, I kept thinking about Booky, and her depression-era family, and this one vivid scene I remember in which they had to close the drapes, and everybody slept in the front room where the fans were. We are depression-era in that we don’t have air-conditioning, though this usually isn’t a problem. Our second and third floor apartment is ensconced high up in the branches of several enormous trees that shade us, and a breeze flows through our three big front windows out the wide-opened kitchen doors. No one wants the 50 degree Celsius breeze however, so yesterday I countered all my ideas of common sense and shut all the windows, closed the blinds first thing in the morning, had the fans going in every room. It worked– we came home after lunch yesterday, and our house was much cooler than the outside (though this wasn’t really saying much). It was a bit like living in a dark and windy cave, but not sweltering at least. By bedtime, however, the heat was uncomfortable.

But when Harriet woke up for something at 4:30 this morning, I came down to check on her and then noticed the blinds at the front blowing in a breeze, and I could feel it, and it was lovely. I went into the kitchen and opened up the doors (we don’t have a window in our kitchen. It’s the doors or nothing) and suddenly air was flowing through the house again, and I was in a quandary. I couldn’t possibly close the doors, but I also couldn’t go back to bed and leave them open, though I longed to, but I read someplace once that we’re not meant to leave our doors wide open in the middle of the night. I decided that one would be unlikely to rob us, however, if one arrived at the doors to find me asleep on the kitchen floor, so that’s what I did, with just a pillow for comfort (and the company of several moths).

It was kind of glorious, and from where I lay, I could see the moon. The breeze was nice. I didn’t sleep so soundly, however, as the kitchen floor is as uncomfortable as it is filthy, so once the birds had brought the sun up with their incessant singing, I decided the time from robbery had probably passed, and returned to the comforts of my mattress.

July 18, 2011

On Victoria Glendinning's biography, and my own journeys with Elizabeth Bowen

I’d never heard of Elizabeth Bowen until I read Susan Hill’s Howard’s End is on the Landing when we were in England in 2009. Hill refers to Bowen as “one of the writers who formed me” and writes about how her novels are difficult but not obscure, and so when I had a ten pound note to get rid of at WH Smith at the airport, I sprung for a gorgeous Vintage Classics edition of Bowen’s The House in Paris. I read about 25 pages on the plane journey home (a fantastic achievement, actually–I had a five month old at the time) and it dawned on me that I hadn’t read a decent novel in ages, that I’d forgotten what literary was, what it meant to be challenged (in ways other than those presented by five month olds).

Back in Canada a few weeks later, I picked up Victoria Glendinning’s biography Elizabeth Bowen: A Writer’s Life. There it languished on my shelf until last summer when it was joined by two of her novels which I knicked (for a small fee) from a dying woman’s house. I finally read one of them, The Heat of the Day, during the last few days of 2010 which I was ill and didn’t want to be challenged. By the end of the novel, I was convinced of its worth, but the convincing had been hard-won and the book was so weird in inexplicable ways. And then I mightn’t have ever read Elizabeth Bowen again, except that I’m reading my shelves in alpha order now, and Bowen starts with B. And then The Last September was so extraordinarily good, that I couldn’t wait to get to the Glendinning G, and my anticipation was not for nothing.

I don’t read enough literary biographies, and should really change that, because what a remarkable way to discover a writer who’s still new to me. To get a sense of Bowen’s historical context (Glendinning writes, “She is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link which connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark”), and to get also a context for her weirdness, the weird convolutedness of her sentences and the daringness of her subject matter (she was just totally weird. But also amazing). And to understand her wider context too, which I’d begun to learn through reading The Last September–the Anglo-Irish tradition, and what that meant, and how it changed with the 1920s.

Anyway, I’ve come away entrenched as a Bowen devotee (what Susan Hill started two years ago!). I am looking forward to rereading The House in Paris, and Bowen’s The Little Girls, and some of her short stories. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more Bowen at the college booksales in the Fall. And for more Victoria Glendinning biographies too, and also Hermione Lee, who I’ve never read before.

Two important things about the Elizabeth Bowen bio: this was first published in the late ’70s, reprinted in the ’90s with an author bio explaining that Glendinning is married to “the Irish writer Terence de Vere White”. Which was kind of weird because White is referenced several times in the book, never in familiar terms (obviously) but so often that it was sort of conspicuous. I consulted Wikipedia later to learn that Glendinning wasn’t married to White at the time she wrote Elizabeth Bowen’s bio, and all’s I can say was that anyone could have seen that they were going to end up together.

Also, that the Igor Gouzenko case features in Elizabeth Bowen’s lifes story! (Bowen was close to the novelist John Buchan, who became the Governor General of Canada, and through him she met her lifelong intimate friend Charles Ritchie, who was a Canadian diplomat.)It would have better had Glendinning and her editors known how to spell Ottawa, but this last is only the one small point that sullied my reading of this wonderful book.

July 14, 2011

Barbara Pym for afters

We’ve invented a new dessert! Or rather, we’ve re-christened a very familiar one. This all came about because Harriet had taken to walking around the house screaming, “Barbara Pym!” Which is a bit weird, because Harriet and I don’t talk about Barbara Pym a lot, but I must talk about her to other people enough that the name is known (and I shouldn’t be surprised– Harriet has had her photo in the Barbara Pym Society newsletter after all).

One night a few weeks back, when Barbara Pym mania was at its height, Harriet was coerced into her chair at the table with the promise that we were going to be eating Barbara Pym for dessert. Dessert turned out to be berries with ice cream, which has since become the Barbara Pym that we eat almost daily. Splendid local raspberries tonight with maple ice cream made this particular dish of Barbara Pym delightful.

Here is a photo of the world’s dirtiest child devouring hers, having just completed her first course, which was mostly ketchup.

July 10, 2011

Tin Book

Because I’ve never stopped regretting not buying the book-shaped teapot I saw in England four years ago, there was not a moment of hesitation before I bought this book-shaped baking tin today. (I will admit, there have been moments of hesitation since. I have a feeling that collecting decorative baking tins is the beginning of a slippery slope to somewhere horrible, but alas, now it’s mine.) It’s a wide open recipe book, and the sides of the tin are the pages. I kind of absolutely love it, and it also means I can retire the baking tin upon which is printed a picture of Santa Claus looking like Satan.

I bought the tin at Madeleines, where we’d stopped in for our favourite watermelon sherbet en-route to the wading pool this afternoon. And after our successful wading pool sojourn, lovely Harriet (as usual) screamed the entire way home…

July 5, 2011

Our own sense of righteousness

Yesterday I went to the bank, the machine ate my card, and told me to report to the teller. The teller was at a loss to explain why this had happened, but figured perhaps my card had been compromised. “It’s a safety feature,” he told me, and I thought, “Yeah, some feature.” Tapping my feet, and anxious to get back outdoors, because this withdrawal had turned into a lengthy process.

So I got a new bank card, and spent the rest of my day. And then tonight I tried to do some banking online, and my card was rejected again. I had to call Customer Service, and I explained my situation. They told me the number on my bank card was for a cancelled card, that I’d gotten my new card and my old card mixed up.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “Your machine ate my old card. This card here is the only one I have.” Well, they didn’t know what to tell me. They were very polite, and I was polite too, but I was seriously annoyed at the bureaucratic idiocy. At how my time was being wasted. I found the paperwork that had come with the new card, and the number was different from the card I was holding. Indeed, the number on the paperwork was what my new card number should have been. “Well, then the number on the card is wrong,” I said. “There has been a mix-up. And now I’m going to have to go down to the bank and get it sorted.”

“Are you sure it’s the number on the card? The card you’re holding in your hand.”
“There is no other card,” I told them. “I told you that already.”

And this was the point at which I did a further exploration of my wallet (which is often being rearranged by someone who is small), and came up with another bank card. The bank card I should have been using. And somehow I had two bank cards after all, and I’d gotten them confused. (How had this happened? Well, these are the mistakes that occur when you keep old, old bank cards for small people to play with. We’ve since discerned that the old, old bank card was used in the machine, retained because it was cancelled, when I went to the teller, he cancelled my current bank card, and gave me a new one. I didn’t bother explaining this to the customer service representative. Instead, I got off the phone really quickly. And then I called back later to apologize, and to make sure a note was put in that representative’s file so they’d know he was terribly patient with the stupid lady.)

Also, this morning a woman shouted at me from across the street for putting dog waste in somebody’s green bin. “I hope that was in a bag,” she said. I was confused. She yelled at me some more, gesturing toward the bin. “…whatever it was you put in there.”

“I didn’t put anything in there,” I told her. I had moved it out of the way so I could push my stroller by, and she’d heard the lid clatter, and assumed I was performing illegal acts of dumping. She felt pretty stupid once she’d realized her mistake, and quite rightly. Mostly because what kind of a person goes around dumping dog waste when they don’t even have a dog?

Anyway, the whole point of this is to say that half the time, none of us know what we’re talking about, even when we think we do. Which is probably something to keep in mind whenever we’re overwhelmed by our own sense of righteousness.

June 26, 2011

On reading and riots

Last week,  a young woman who’d been photographed taking part in the Stanley Cup riots posted an online apology in which she first claimed to take responsibility for her actions, and then indignantly outlined the reasons why blame cast her way was disproportionate: mob mentality, that she’d only committed theft and not arson, the theft was for souvenir purposes, she’d been drunk–nice try, works for rapists– and besides, the whole thing was completely out of character. (I think she may have since had some PR consulting, however. The indignant bits of the post have been removed, and she now reads as genuinely sorry.)

As I read the post last week though, I thought about how much this young woman still had to learn about atonement. That perhaps she was victim of a culture that fools us into thinking public apology trumps being good in the first place. I thought of her remarkable sense of entitlement, how her fierce impression of who she was did not seem at all changed by what she had done. And if she was right, I thought, that her actions that night had indeed been completely out of character, then that was only because she didn’t have any character.

Character, according to Joan Didion (in “On Self-Respect”): “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.”

I thought about the mob mentality which the girl claimed had swept her right up, and I sort of understood it. Though you’ve got to wonder about the kind of person who gets swept up in a mob in the first place. These are the kinds of people who think being alive is a spectator sport.

And I thought about how much I dislike the part of church services where a minister speaks, and the congregation responds in unison. How even fans at a baseball game singing the national anthem makes me cringe a bit, because in circumstances like this, we’re speaking automatically, not thinking about anything we are saying. It’s a different kind of mob mentality, and one that is benign, but then I start thinking about the Nuremburg Rally, like it’s all a slippery slope. On the rare occasions when I happen to be in a church, I don’t respond when called on. I listen instead. And the droning sound of everyone’s voices is always a little bit terrifying.

Naturally, I am being melodramatic, but I was also thinking about reading. About how reading can be a communal experience, how it’s an exchange between writer and reader, but mostly how the latter retains his individuality. The power of the reader to regard the text with a discerning eye, and to re-read so the text changes as he does. I’m thinking about how reading is the opposite of mob mentality, and that armed with critical skills to apply to the world, a reader is unlikely to be swept away by any such thing.

There are arguments against this, of course. Someone will always mention Mao’s Little Red Book. But I’m still thinking that to read well is to learn to reside inside one’s own head, and I think there’s such tremendous value in that.