March 11, 2010
ARM Update
I’ve just received an email update through Friends of the Association for Research on Mothering (see my previous post). Apparently, the response has been incredible, media coverage considerable and Andrea O’Reilly writes, “…that this was accomplished by everyday women reveals that grassroots feminist activism is still very much alive in these so called post-feminist times.” Indeed.
She writes also that they’re determined to keep Demeter Press running, and you can show your support by buying one of their titles at the new Demeter website. May I suggest Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”, which the likes of me have called “the very best book on motherhood I have ever read”? It’s worth an entire parenting library, I promise you, for $34.95. (Read my review.)
And I think I am going to get White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood.
February 12, 2010
Why I have business in the bedroom of Adam Giambrone
I don’t know if there are two things I like more than passing judgement and reading stories, and so I’ve been wholly absorbed by the perils of Adam Giambrone this week. I’ve long had my eye on the guy, if only to use his surname as verb in various contexts, which is always funny when I’m overtired, and so I’ve been paying attention since Monday, however much that’s less than high-minded to admit.
I’ve been paying attention because I’m a follower of plot, of twists and turns, and wild leaps. Office couches, text messages, denials then tears at the press conference. The scintillating details, the text messages, and we’re not supposed to care because it’s his private life after all, but don’t you care just for that reason? The kind of access to private lives that we usually have to read novels for, and perhaps it’s why we read novels anyway. How can you turn away from it? I can’t.
Of course, there are real people involved, real lives at stake. To which I posit that there aren’t. Case in point, the picture above from The Toronto Star— have you ever seen a more calculated chemistry? I could say I’m sorry for the wife, but I wouldn’t really mean it. To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. Giambrone himself has become a fiction, has probably long been one, but we know it now. If he were less lame, he’d be Jay Gatsby. And of course, there’s a real Giambrone still deep down inside him, but that’s not the guy upon whom I’m passing judgement.
The guy upon whom I’m passing judgement is an idiot. Not only does he think that women are disposable, but he dates the kind of woman who wouldn’t hesitate to destroy his whole career in a heartbeat. The kind of woman who’d date him even though she thinks he lives with his parents, and he’s 32. And– though this population is larger than I’d initially suspected — he dates the kind of woman who’d tolerate that haircut. He gets caught, and he lies about it. He someone who knows himself better than anyone else knows him and yet he sets himself up for this exact situation by pursuing public life (which, let’s face it, most people don’t do for really honorable reasons). Even the smartest guy would have trouble balancing his public face with a life that’s a lie.
I’m not condemning Adam Giambrone for immorality, for that kind of thing is always a little bit subjective, but I think I’m allowed to call it as I see it– he’s an idiot.
I hate the word “peccadillo”. Why do women never get to have those? A “peccadillo” trivializes all manner of sins, packs them up in a neat valise that rhymes with armadillo, and how convenient is that? And then someone will lecture me about casting first stones, but these guys get up to the kind of wrongdoing I’d never consider. I know I’m young, but I’m getting older every day, and I remain steadfast about this. And to suggest that I’m just naive then is an insult to men of integrity everywhere, and I’ve met an awful lot of these in my life. I just think we all deserve a lot better.
January 30, 2010
Raise high the roofbeam carpenters
Phoebe Caulfield was Holden’s nine-year old sister, plucky as a red-headed orphan, just lacking appropriate pigmentation and tragedy. Even Holden would affirm that, “if you don’t think she’s smart, you’re mad.”
Pheobe was a writer, composing the stories of “Hazel Weatherfield” in her multiple notebooks. As an actor, she was ecstatic to have the largest part in her class play, even if it involved playing Benedict Arnold. “Elephants knock[ed] her out.” Phoebe Caulfield was a force to be reckoned with, pouring ink down the windbreaker of anyone who dare cross her path and she could recite Robbie Burns on command.
She was also a realist. While her brother Holden tried to deny his bleak reality, Phoebe made a point of thrusting the thing in his face. Not allowing him the luxury of his skewed perspective, sick of tirades about phoniness, she says bluntly, “You don’t like anything.” In contrast, Pheobe herself was able to make the best of her difficulties. Holden’s drunken shattering of record he’d bought for her failed to hinder her enthusiasm for the gift: “‘Gimme the pieces,’ she said. ‘I’m saving them.'”
A beacon in her brother’s lonely existence, Phoebe’s love makes clear Holden’s real emotional capacity and the depth of his troubles. Upon learning that he’d been expelled from yet another school, hers is the first display of genuine, grounded concern anyone shows him. Her maturity outmatches Holden’s, and his tender feelings towards her highlight his own vulnerability.
In Phoebe, Holden also sees the innocence he has lost, but elsewhere in Salinger’s oeuvre is evidence that Phoebe Caulfield was wise rather than naive, and that her wisdom beyond her years (“Old Phoebe”) might never have disappeared. I like to think that if Salinger had continued the saga of the Caulfield family, Phoebe would have grown up to be someone much like Boo Boo Glass.
Of course, the details of Salinger’s salacious personal life widely reported him as something of a letch, and his stories contain their share of one-dimensional female characters. But he knew something about women, or perhaps something about sisters is more what I mean.
Boo-Boo appears in the background of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters. She also makes an appearance in “Down at the Dinghy” from Nine Stories, in which “[h]er general unprettiness aside,” writes Salinger, “she was a stunning and final girl.” Ever capable, Boo-Boo flew with the Woman’s Air Force in World War Two, bravely tackled anti-Semitism in her marriage to a Jewish man, and mothered her young son with the same insightful sensitivity Phoebe provides to her brother Holden.
In a tortured world of Seymour and perfect days for bananafish, Boo-Boo stands on the side of justice, for all things bright and good, however much in vain. And I am insistent upon optimism, so for me, it is her spirit that pervades Salinger’s best writing and makes me love it so. Her presence in Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters consists solely of a note left on the bathroom mirror of her brothers’ New York apartment. “‘Raise high the roofbeam carpenters… Please be happy happy happy. This is an order. I outrank everyone on the block.”
(an earlier version of this piece appeared in the independent weekly on September 6 2001.)
January 21, 2010
Pre-Swiftian Love Story
Poet P.K. Page, who died last week, has been eulogized aplenty since then, and I don’t really have much to add to the chorus, except that she was certainly an extraordinary person (as demonstrated by this brilliant obituary by Sandra Martin at the Globe & Mail) and I’m glad I got to meet her once. Though I spent only a little time in her presence, that presence was unforgettable and she was everything they said.
Less eulogized, however, has been Erich Segal, author of the novel Love Story, who died the other day at the age of 72. When I was twelve, I found a library copy of this novel in a desk at school (checked out under someone else’s name) and I stole it. Proceeded then to worship it through my unlovable teen years in hope that a hockey-playing, MG-driving, heir to a great fortune might just fall in love with me before I died of leukemia, even though I was neither Ali McGraw nor a musical prodigy. Even though I didn’t love Mozart or Bach, but I did love The Beatles, and I would have loved Oliver too, given the chance.
I haven’t read this book for quite awhile, but I read it so often back in the day that my original copy fell apart and I had to replace it (which wasn’t difficult. Love Story is always readily available used, usually displayed along with poetry collections by Rod McKuen). I am pretty sure that Love Story was not a great book, but I really loved it, and I must give credit to the man who wrote the book I’ve probably read more often than I’ll reread any other book in my life.
Though the book was wrong, and love does mean having to say you’re sorry, as unromantic as that sounds, but seeing as Jenny was only 25 when she died, perhaps she just didn’t have long enough to figure that out.
December 22, 2009
Lately
I’ve been making stuff lately. I’ve also been spending money at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore which is in dire financial straits and accepting donations. And there’s just three more shopping days until Christmas!
December 18, 2009
Why a bias towards fiction is essential
Douglas Hunter’s recent article on readers’ bias toward fiction made me consider that literary non-fiction benefits from a reading public hungry for Wayne Rooney’s autobiographical volumes, Sarah Palin’s memoir, Eat Pray Love, The Secret, that book about the world’s worst dog, Skinny Bitch Bun in the Oven, and Mitch Albom no more than literary fiction does. In fact, literary non-fiction (which, according to Hunter, is usually about ice and written by men called Ken) probably ends up worse off, because “literary non-fiction” is not a term so flung around anyway, and most of us fictionish folks do imagine the Kens basking out there in the glow of bestsellerdom, along with Mitch Albom. Non-fiction sells; everybody knows that, and we’ve just never cared to break it down any further.
Hunter’s point that literary non-fiction gets short shrift is a valid one then, but I felt Canada Reads as his target was strangely misdirected. The point of Canada Reads is the novel, so it’s unsurprising that a word of non-fiction has never been included. Perhaps that a similar campaign does not exist for non-fiction makes more sense to consider, and Hunter does go on to show the underwhelming amount of attention paid to the Governor General Literary Award’s non-fiction nominees as opposed to the fiction, or to the Charles Taylor Prize compared to the Gillers.
But it is here that I want to stand up and state the importance of Canada Reads being about fiction, and the importance of fiction in general. Because there are certain instances in which a book is not just a book, and I think that a remarkable novel is one of them. There is an exercise in imagination necessary for fiction that non-fiction does not require, which is not to say that the latter is inferior, but rather that the effect of a group of people reading the former is a far more powerful thing. Reading not necessarily to learn, not to be transported to a place that has ever existed, sans political or cultural agenda (most ideally), to conjure a world that has been created out of air… and words. A book that exists for the sake of itself.
I think it’s important that if as a nation we’re to read just one book that that book be a novel. Perhaps my bias toward the authenticity of fiction is showing, but it has more potential to take us places together. One nation, one book, and that one novel will be a different book for everyone doesn’t matter any less, for that’s the very point of it.
December 16, 2009
The Post
If I had to pick just one thing about the English novel, I don’t think I could, but if pressed to pick five things, one of them would have to be the post. Much in the same way that cell phones are pivotal to contemporary plotting, the British postal system is essential to the 20th century Englist novel. As are teacups, spinsters, knitting, seaside B&Bs, and the vicar, or maybe I’ve just been reading too much Barbara Pym, but the mail is always coming and going– have you noticed that? Someone is always going out to post a letter, or writing a letter that never gets posted, or a posted letter goes unreceived, or remains unopened on the hall table.
My day is divided into two: Before Post and After Post. BP is the morning full of expectation, anticipation, and (dare I?) even hope. AP is either a satisfying pile on the kitchen table, or acute disappointment with fingers crossed for better luck tomorrow. In my old house I was in love with the mailman, but that love remained unrequited because I was in grad school then and he only ever saw me wearing track pants. When we lived in Japan, I once received a parcel addressed to me with only my name and the name of the city where we lived (and humiliated myself and was given a sponge, but that’s another story.) When we lived in England, the post arrived two times a day and even Saturday, but the only bad thing was that when I missed a package, I had to take a bus out to a depot in another town.
All of which is to say that I love mail as an institution, as much as I love sending or receiving it. I once met a woman who told me that her husband was a mailman (though she called him a “letter-carrier”, I’m not sure if there’s most dignity in that), and I think she was taken aback when I almost jumped into her arms.
So when I read this piece in the LRB by a Royal Mail employee regarding the recent British mail strike, I had mixed feelings. I was troubled by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Royal Mail of late, the compromise that comes from profit as the bottom line, the explanation of how Royal Mail is part-privatized already, their focus on the corporate customer. “Granny Smith doesn’t matter anymore,” this piece ends with, and they’re not talking about apples, but instead their Regular Joseph(ine) customers. Those of us whose ears perk up at the sound of mail through the letterbox, at the very sound of the postman’s footfall on the steps.
I took some heart, however, from the article’s point that it is a falsehood that “figures are down”. “Figures are down” appears to be corporate shorthand to justify laying off workers, increasing workloads, eliminating full time contracts, pensions etc. Apparently the Royal Mail brass has no experience on the floor, they’re career-managers (and they’ve probably got consultants) who come up with ingenious ways to show that “figures are down”. Mail volume, for example, used to be measured by weight, but now it’s done by averages. And during the past year, Royal Mail has “arbitrarily, and without consultation” been reducing the number of letters in the average figures. According to the writer, “This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.”
So yes, none of this good news about the state of labour or capitalism, but what I like is this part: “People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card.”
This is hope! I do love letters, namely reading collections of them in books (and particularly if they’re written by Mitfords), but I’ll admit to not writing many of them. My love of post is not so much about epistles, but about the postal system itself. A crazy little system to get the most incidental objects from here to there. I like that I can lick an envelope, and it can land on a Japanese doorstep within the week. I like receiving magazines, and thank you notes, and party invitations, and books I’ve ordered, and Christmas presents, and postcards. I like that in the summer, Harriet received a piece of mail nearly every single day.
And I really love Christmas cards. Leah McLaren doesn’t though, because she gets them from her carpet cleaner and then feels bad because she doesn’t send any herself. I manage to free myself from such compunction by sending them out every single year, and in volumes that could break a tiny man’s back. Spending enough on stamps to bring on bankruptcy, but I look upon this as I look upon book-buying– doing my part to keep an industry I love thriving (or less dying). Yesterday, I posted sixty (60!) Christmas cards, though I regret I can no longer say to every continent except Africa. Because my friend Kate no longer lives in Chile, but my friend Laura is still working at the very bottom of the world so we’ve still got Antarctica, which is remarkable at any rate.
I love Christmas cards. I send them because I’ve got aunts and uncles and extended family that I never see, but I want them to know that they mean something to me anyway. And it does mean something, however small that gesture. These connections matter, these people thinking of us all over the world. Having lived abroad for a few years, I’ve also got friends in far-flung places, and without small moments of contact like this, it would be difficult to keep them. It’s impossible to maintain regular contact with everybody we know and love, but these little missives get sent out into the world, like a nudge to say, “I’m here if you need me.”
I also send them because I’ve got these people in my life that I’m crazy about, and I want to let them know as much. Particularly in a year like this when friends and family have so rallied ’round– let it be written that it all meant the world to me, then stuck in an envelope and sealed with a stamp.
But mostly (and here I confess), I write Christmas cards because people send them back to me. I’ve never once received as many as I send, but the incomings are pretty respectable nonetheless. I love that most December days BP, I’ve got a good chance of red envelopes arriving stacked thick as a doorstop. And if not today, there will be at least one card tomorrow. I love receiving photos of my friends’ babies, and updates on friends and family we don’t hear from otherwise, and the good news and the hopeful news, and just to know that so many people were thinking of us. We display them over our fireplace hanging on a string. It is a bit like Valentines in elementary school, a bit like a popularity contest, but if you were as unpopular as I was in elementary school, you’d understand why strings and strings of cards are really quite appealing.
I love it all. That there are people in places all over the world, and they’re sticking stuff in mailboxes
pillared or squared, and that stuff will get to us. That at least one system in the universe sort of almost works, and that I’ve even got friends. And then– this is most important– what would the modern English novel be without it?
December 15, 2009
Bits and pieces
I’ve got some good stuff in the works here, but I need a day or two for polishing before it’s posted, so please bear with a little list of links instead of actual content. Oh, and also know that Canada Reads: Independently will be unveiled in the coming days. And further, that I just finished reading The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham, which was the first Midsomer Murders book. I only read it to uncover Barnaby lore, but I enjoyed it. Realize I’m lazy at mysteries though, refraining from trying to put the pieces together myself. You know that chapter where the detective knows who did it, lays all the cards out on the table and his subordinate (and the reader) are expected to draw their own conclusions? I don’t even bother. Puzzles make my brain hurt. I read these books for the plotting, so I’m hardly going to stop and think when I can flip over to the next page. I also read An Education by Lynn Barber, which I highly recommend. Less sensational than I’d been led to believe, but a wonderful record of a somewhat unconventional career in journalism.
Today at the Advent Books Blog, I recommend Cynthia Flood’s The English Stories. I loved this list of Books my toddler loves for no good reason that I can work out. Canada Reads’ official blogger defends the books selected for this year. The TNQ Cover story. And in case you missed it, Rebecca Rosenblum announces her second book.
November 12, 2009
There is no excuse
There is no excuse for the accompanying photo, except that my baby is adorable. Alright then, bookishly. I thumbed through the new Pierre Trudeau biography the other day, and now I am afraid I’m the only woman in Canada who never slept with him. He didn’t even want me to live with him and have his child, like Liona Boyd (who is Liona Boyd?) on the cover of Hello. This may or may not be unfortunate. I just finished reading What Boys Like by Amy Jones (review forthcoming!) and have just started Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”. Patricia has directed my attention to what seems to be the worst picture book ever: The Mischievous Mom at the Art Gallery by “high-octane duo” Rebecca Eckler and Erica Ehm. A new level of narcissism— we have to be reflected in our kids’ books now? “Finally — a picture book for the Starbucks-armed, BlackBerry-checking, gym-going working mother.” Perhaps you’re meant to read it on the treadmill. Chapters/Indigo includes a “Green Matters” option on its online catalogue, narrowing searches to books printed on FSC/Recycled Content. On the best Sesame Street songs (in honour of the show’s fortieth birthday). They forgot ladybug picnic. Charlotte on The Children’s Storefront, a neighbourhood institution that was lost in a fire last week. Rona Maynard’s secrets to decades upon decades of marriage. I’ve been enjoying books/music site Sasquatch Radio. WriterGuy directed me towards the interesting “How Waterstones killed bookselling” (in light of my recent post about how Waterstones killed book buying, for me, at least). And I’m wondering if I’m the only one who starts carrying around my next book to be read once the current read is down to the last fifty pages or so. Indeed, if I don’t have something fabulous to read within arm’s length at all times, I do start to get a little nervous.
