September 6, 2011
My Library Matters to Me
I entered the “My Library Matters to Me Contest” because there might be someone left on earth to whom I haven’t yet told my tales of library love. The contest is run by the Our Public Library campaign, in defense of Toronto’s public libraries. If I am chosen as one of the winners, I’ll get to have lunch with one of the participating authors, which doesn’t bode well considering my record with author contact. (What if Margaret Atwood greets me with, “We meet again,” and then asks me why I’ve stopped wearing a visor?)
Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this is because I would very much like not to win this contest in order to save myself a lot of social awkwardness. And the more people that enter, the less chance I have, so won’t you help a girl out and enter too? Because surely your library matters to you. The deadline is Friday, so you’ve still got time.
July 20, 2011
Support the Toronto Public Library
I can’t bear to talk muncipal politics here, because it absolutely breaks my heart. Must urge anyone who hasn’t yet, however, to sign the petition supporting Toronto’s incredible public library system. I’ve never been shy about my love for Toronto’s libaries, mostly because they saved my life once, and I think that it’s tragic that some of our fellow citizens don’t know the value of the treasure in our midst. If you do know the value, however, I urge you to make your voice heard. (And then our voices will be dismissed because we’re a weird fringe special interest group of librarian patrons who, with our library cards, have a conflict of interest anyway, and no right to impinge our beliefs on the taxpaying majority. [Sob])
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.”
December 14, 2010
Literary Intersections
I haven’t read Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces in years and years, but I am still buzzing from Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto. Having read that book recently means that I was familiar with the passage from Fugitive Pieces displayed on the Project Bookmark plaque on the Northwest corner of College and Manning Streets, which Harris also excerpts in her book to give a sense of that neighbourhood’s international quality. Context upon context. Books make neighbourhood roaming a most satisfying pursuit on this cold and snowy day.
December 7, 2010
Our cities unfold
“…the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar, or bureaucracy and money, but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realize that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.” –Amy Lavender Harris, Imagining Toronto
November 18, 2010
Behind every TPL Librarian…
In my experience, behind every Toronto Public Library librarian, there is a little bit of awesome. Take TPL Librarian Martha Baillie for instance, whose awesome behind her is the acclaimed and wondrous The Incident Report. I’ve already mentioned our local librarian Mariella, who goes around the world telling stories, but we get to hear her in our neighbourhood every week. A whole lot of awesome, I thought, but it turned out to not even be the half of it.
For the last month, we’ve been attending the toddler program at the Lillian H. Smith
branch, being just on the verge of having outgrown Spadina Road’s Baby Time. And we love it– Harriet gets to run around, gaze at big kids, misbehave, sing songs, play games, do the beanbag song, and hear stories read by Joanne, who we adored from the get-go. Back at Spadina, I was telling Mariella about how much we were enjoying it, and she asked me if we’d read Joanne’s books.
“Joanne has books?” I asked. Of course she does, and Mariella directed us to Our Corner Grocery Store and City Alphabet. The marvelous Joanne is actually Joanne Schwartz, who is as talented at writing books as she is at reading them. And I’ve really enjoyed them, her text perfectly complementing the images by photographer Matt Beam and illustrator Laura Beingessner. Both are generically urban enough to be from anywhere, but I can’t help but see Toronto on every page. Both books, in very different ways, celebrating urban communities and particular uniquenesses that characterize the places where we live.
November 10, 2010
The Carnivore by Mark Sinnett
I first learned of The Carnivore when it was on the shortlist for the Toronto Book Award, and its author Mark Sinnett was reading an excerpt on the radio. The excerpt was intriguing, featuring a husband and wife meeting together on the shore of Lake Ontario as swimmer Marilyn Bell completed her crossing of the lake in 1954. The simple dynamic between the couple belied something darker and deeper, and the historical detail was inconspicuously well done. When The Carnivore ended up taking the prize, I knew that I had to read it.
When Ray Townes is in the final stages of emphysema, he and his wife Mary look back on the course of their marriage, and how their lives hinged on Hurricane Hazel, which ravaged Toronto in October 1954. The couple doesn’t look back together, however, the book consisting of alternating chapters from their two solitudes. The effect of this is interesting, as we learn that each of them has their own secrets about how much they know about the other and what they’ve chosen to withhold.
Ray is a police man who spent the hurricane rescuing citizens clinging to rooftops and washed out bridges. What the newspaper articles profiling his heroics fail to reveal, however, is that his courage that night stemmed from a mania that arose from a terrible act he’d committed, and that while he was supposed to be on duty, Ray had been driving around the city with his mistress. Mary is aware of all of this, however, which is why she resents the rehashing of events as the 50th anniversary of the hurricane approaches. She has never been able to forgive her husband for what he did and what he took from her, and now her own traumatic memories of the hurricane have been awakened– she was a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and witnessed horrific injuries that night she’d never been able to forget.
Sinnett’s depiction of the hurricane– the rushing rivers, the broken bodies in the hospital, the force of nature that tore its way through a city– are the most compelling aspect of the novel. They are riveting, illuminating and unflinching in their portrayal of a tragedy that seems to have been whitewashed by years of familiarity– like Hazel was somebody’s elderly aunt who came visiting once. Sinnett deftly uses detail in the story to describe the hurricane and the more general atmosphere of Toronto in 1954, his historical fiction not toned by sepia even though the book is structured as a reflection.
The back-and-forth in the narrative, and that the story is told to the reader rather than immediately experienced makes the plot read a little mechanically at times. Similarly the characters, who we’re permitting such a limited perspective of by their own voices and the partner’s perspective. Though some of the gaps Sinnett leaves in the character are interesting– we don’t get all the answers about why they’ve done the things they have, and that space to ponder is particularly engaging.
The Carnivore is a worthy recipient of The Toronto Book Award, a deserving book that will strike a chord with readers from Toronto and elsewhere. A book that uncovers another layer to a city we think we know.
July 4, 2010
Pie in the sunshine
Will you tolerate another picture of a pie in the sunshine? This time a cherry pie (my first! Hulling is tedious, but the pie is delicious) in stars because I don’t have a maple leaf cutter. Purchased with cherries from our farmer’s market, which supplied much of the deliciousness we partook in this weekend. We had a wonderful Canada Day in the sunshine, with friends for dinner, and then spent the rest of the weekend soaking up the city. We went to Trinity Bellwoods Park on Saturday, and I’d forgotten about wading pools, which meant that Harriet had to go swimming in her clothes. She was all right with this, however, and also got in lots of swinging, and sliding, and crawling in the grass. A similar day was had today at Christie Pits, where we also watched an old-time baseball game, went swimming in the city pool (not just wading, and we were equipped with suits and towels), and then played afterwards underneath shady trees. The parks in this city are better than any backyard you could dream of. It was a whole weekend as good as the pie.
The one problem with all this goodness, however, is Harriet’s “separation anxiety”. Quite a difference from last year at this time when Harriet didn’t like anything, she now doesn’t want to leave anything she encounters– she cries when we take her out of the swing, when we take her out of the pool, when she has to get off her bike, when her dad leaves the house in the morning, when the UPS guy leaves the house after having me sign here, when she has to put her ball down, when anybody (including complete strangers) is playing with a ball and she can’t have it, when we get to the last page of Over in the Meadow, and heaven forbid I take my keys out of her mouth, and suggest she not eat my credit card. She’s also taken to pointing at things she wants and screaming in a way that shatters eardrums. I now understand why sign language might have been useful (but still, not I how might have implemented it into life).
She does take things hard, does Harriet. She has never ever left a playground and not had eyes streaming with tears… Though she really is a happy kid, recovering quickly from her traumas. At left is a photo of us taken last week by Star reporter Vinnie Talotta, which is pretty much our Hats most of the time.
Anyway, I am very busy lately working toward an upcoming deadline, and I’ve also gotten involved in a reading project (which I’ll tell you about when the time comes) that involves me having to read 20+ books in the next two months. This means my library books are way backlogged, and some even due back without having been touched, and my summer rereading project has totally stalled. I should be able to step up some in the days ahead, however, and I look forward to reading Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive, rereading Joan Didion, and writing up a post about our next meeting of The Vicious Circle and this month’s book, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And updating you about my ongoing obsession with bananas, of course. You’ve probably been waiting for that.
March 30, 2010
On community
I joined Twitter about a month ago, and I’m still not quite sold. First, twitter vocabulary makes me cringe. It also gives me a window into a whole host of things going on that I’m not a part of, so I feel left out, and I probably liked it better when I didn’t know what I was missing. That said, it is the best way to get links to great content, and I really appreciate that. Some people manage to be consistantly hilarious in 140 characters. Interesting to note that my favourite people to follow tend to have columns in major newspapers– either they’re terribly good with words, or they have more free time than the rest of us.
The point of Twitter is community, though Twitter is not so much where the action takes place, but it can point you in the direction of the places where things are happening. And because there are a lot of these places, Twitter becomes very useful.
Julie Wilson’s Book Madam and Associates is in full swing: “a collective of publishing and media professionals who love bright ideas and have been known to have a few of their own.” She’s just announced her crew of associates, and the group of them managed to pack an Irish pub last Thursday night. The Book Madam has also just announced her online Book Club’s first pick: Amphibian by Carla Gunn. It’s like Oprah, but with less conflict with Frey and Franzen.
The Keepin’ it Real Book Club has yet to come down from their Canada Reads: Civilians Read high. (And okay, I’ve just read their latest post in which I was referred to nicely. Which I didn’t plan, but I still like it. Community sure has its good points). Newest side project is “Books in 140 Seconds”, which is a whole Book Club meeting in 140 seconds. They read Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld to start things off: check out the first video here. (Aside: I hated Prep, in case you’re wondering, and didn’t come to love Sittenfeld until American Wife.)
The KIRBC has also got behind the Toronto Public Library’s amazing Keep Toronto Reading campaign. 99 reading journals are currently floating around the city, they have a Books We Love promotion with readers doing video pitches, and many other events, online and otherwise.
October 7, 2009
Some links
DoveGreyReader reflects upon reflecting upon reading (after reading Susan Hill’s Howards’ End is on the Landing, which has joined my bookish wishlist and I will probably buy it when we go to England next week, along with all the other books I’ll probably buy when we go to England next week. Too bad everything is my weakness, huh?). At Inklings, the first interesting article in ages I’ve read about e-books. Salon de Refuses lives on in academia! The misadventures of The New Quarterly at Word on the Street. Dionne Brand is Toronto’s new poet laureate. Hilary Mantel on being a social worker.
