August 20, 2005
With its checkerboard floors
Three days spent as follows. Drive to Toronto, have lunch in the Annex. In-laws to shoe museum as we buy a futon (our first piece of furniture!). To Greg’s Ice Cream, where they were sadly out of roasted marshmallow. Walk to Honest Ed’s and down Markham to Harbord, and then over to Ossington and our new neighbourhood. Check out the apartment, which is now empty and grow very very excited. Walk through Little Italy, have Ice Tea in Kensington, walk through Chinatown, get in a row over a Miffy pencil case and then go to my Aunt’s for a lovely dinner. Day two- drive to Niagara Falls, see Falls and the Tour Behind the Falls and get very wet. Walk along the river a bit, and avoid the city. Drive the Niagara Parkway to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Have lunch there and shop around a bit. Drive back to Toronto and have dinner in Chinatown, buy Miffy pencil case. Walk across King’s College Circle to Katie’s gorgeous place for dessert. Day three- go to Centre Island, walk to Ward’s Island and have a drink. Have a hotdog for lunch, followed by Smoothies, and then let them loose in the Eaton’s Centre, while we sit on a couch in the housewares department in Sears and are bothered by no one. Dinner and then home.
August 17, 2005
When toasting a bagel, the cut sides must face away from each other
There hasn’t been much time to settle down and there won’t be for a while. It was a good, though tiring weekend and family tensions were running high. Highlights for me were having so many friends together, repeating our vows, good weather, excellent food, hopefully good photos and wine. It was wonderful to see Mike for the first time in ages. In other reunions, I met up with high school friend Laura Conchelos last night for a drink, and then we had breakfast this morning with Carrie Nicholls (who is no longer Carrie Nicholls but always will be in my mind) who had her third baby in tow, a beautiful five month old boy. Last night we were treated to a boat ride on Stoney Lake by Britt’s family. Today we went to the zoo and then saw the amazing “That Summer” at the 4th Line Theatre. Tomorrow we’re off to Toronto for three days, which will also include a trip to Niagara Falls. In fabulous second-hand news, Stuart got a bike for $20 and a Game Cube for $60, and we both can’t wait to move into our new apartment.
I’ve been lacking the time/concentration to read much but really enjoyed this article by the gas-guzzling Margaret Wente, about how the language of the marketplace has spilled over into every part of life. She writes, “Anyone who cares about language, about meaning, about clarity, should revolt. Citizens are not customers, and democracy is not a product. If Barbra Streisand had sung “Customers . . . customers who need customers,” would anyone have cared? If Martin Luther King had said, “I have a vision statement,” would anyone have listened? Words matter more than we think. We need them to express our deepest values. As a wise man once said, what does it profit you if you gain market share but lose your soul? Or something like that.”
It’s not just the language of the marketplace, it’s a manipulation of language to exalt the mundane, to make giving read getting something in return, to trick people into accepting bad news. There is an art to that, but it’s too common now to really matter. I recently received a toaster with two pages of instructions as to how to operate it. Any literature your bank sends out and the very fact that banks send out literature. The day our train broke down in Southampton, due to a “safety feature”. It’s annoying to have to translate everything from bullshit into plain English. As a writer, I don’t know what that says about me. I guess I think it’s ok to bend English, but it’s just being done for all the wrong reasons.
August 14, 2005
Rattle Your Jewelry
I am fairly incoherent today, mixing up words like “balloon” and “elephant” and announcing others’ adultery to rooms full of people. Stuart and I got married again last night, and our (that was supposed to say “are” but there you have it, I am braindead) actually quite happy to have finished with all the weddings we will ever have. Weddings are a headache, but I think when you’ve just been wed and you’re full of gooey goodness you can take it. It’s different when you’ve been married nearly two months. While we were getting our photos taken yesterday, we had to pretend to still love each other though the humour in it all was not lost and it was not long before we actually did. It was great to have so many people together, though I found making sure they were all happy a bit stressful and don’t think I really succeeded. I also eventually got really drunk which made it difficult to make sure of anything. We got some incredible gifts. I hope the givers felt the party made it worth it and that everyone did enjoy themselves. Stay tuned for photos then!
In the news- Hi Ivor Tossell! On foster parenting, dear to my heart due to former career as a social services admin worker. The legend of John Lennon, apparently usurped by 50 Cent’s. A new poetry workshop in The Guardian. On Islands in fiction.
More later. I am so so so tired now.
August 7, 2005
That's astute, I said.
Well, the really exciting news is that I have been actively hobbying lately, and you can read all about it here. We went camping last night at Serpent’s Mounds with Britt and it was wonderful, the highlight of the evening when Stuart asked if the geese had a “no-honk guarantee”. They didn’t. We also went out for drink when Jennie was in town on Friday, and that was fun too. And I broke my guitar and its springs, which wasn’t fun. As wasn’t when the invoice for my tuition turned up in the mailbox.
But enough of that. There were newspapers to read. I enjoyed this article on what books are, and what the internet can never be. Marina Warner notes that “reading in cyberspace seems to me to make different use of cognitive faculties, unfleshing the word, and correspondingly disembodying memories.” The Wedding Planner woman from The Guardian two year back is quite unhappily married. Lucky for her, Bridget Jones is back!Here, a brilliant article on the need for good editors, how editors shaped “Sons and Lovers”, “The Great Gatsby” and “The Wasteland”, and how perhaps creative writing programs teach writers how to edit as much as how to write, and I really appreciate that idea. In The Guardian, on the anniversary of Hiroshima. Here on Hiroshima Haiku. I also thought The Globe had some good coverage, including this piece on Canadian POWs in Japan, a story that needs telling though it would be simple for the more liberal minded of us to sweep that bit of history under the table, and keep on about ending nuclear proliferation. Lynn Crosbie here on stupid-inducing TV fandom, asking “Have we arrived at a cultural cognizance crisis, where, say, Screech’s locker from Saved by the Bell is more vivid to us than the black boxes of crashed planes?” India Knight angrily on the “invisible” gender. Which our new Governor General perhaps will aid in rectifying. Columnist Kate Taylor astutely writes, “With Jean’s appointment, Martin is addressing an increasingly embarrassing discrepancy in our political leadership: Our elected representatives do not really represent us. In the current Parliament, there are 308 MPs; 65 are women — that’s only 21 per cent of the house. About 16 to 18 of those members could be considered of a visible minority — that’s less than 6 per cent of the House, while Statistics Canada’s last census, in 2001, showed that 13.4 per cent of the population is visible minority. For whatever reason — and I would suspect the fault lies with political parties’ inability or unwillingness to find a more diverse group of candidates, rather than with the electors’ preference for white men — blacks, Asians and women are not adequately participating in Canadian politics. As long as that remains true, astute political appointments can be used to do something to right the balance.”
August 3, 2005
!
Busy. We’ve got a second wedding to plan you see and in-laws due to visit in a week. I am going to begin a series of poems based on a old book we bought in Brighton about tiger hunting, and work on edits for my novel, which is now a hard copy for the first time in its life. In other news, I will be a student again in just over a month.
Regarding books, I finished “Small Island” by Andrea Levy and then read “Case Histories” by Kate Atkinson on Sunday. Yes, in one day, and it’s not a short book, I just couldn’t rest until I got to the end. Those two books, along with “We Need to talk about Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, constitute some of very best modern literature I’ve ever read. And now “the best by women” or “the best written recently”. I mean it full stop. Shriver’s book left me gasping and gutted at the final twist. Levy’s book was just astounding, written from four points of view by four quite sympathetic/unsympathetic characters, depending on who was speaking and she bore right into their souls. To write a story so convincingly multi-dimensional in its narrative voice is a feat. It was also a very interesting book about Englishness and what it is to be an outsider in Britain. Atkinson’s book was a whodunit with a litfic twist. I charged through the book, obsessed with finding out who had done it, and once all was known it was clear that the journey had been as good as the destination.
(I don’t want to criticise but “Case Histories” broke down in one spot. There was a character who lived in Toronto and was thus a “Torontian” and had a cottage up in the wild ancient forests on Lake Ontario. I don’t think so! I hate factual inaccuracies in books, because it undermines the storyteller’s authority. It’s a massive responsibility for a writer to get everything perfect, and sometimes it doesn’t matter but often it does.)
In gleanings. Lauren Snyder writes about her Las Vegas wedding and why she didn’t have religious marriage ceremony, explaining that “When I got married, I didn’t want to be lying under oath.” The ever-provocative Lionel Shriver on the troubles: “For the citizens of that province to have murdered one another for decades over a trifling border dispute is a scandal.” The life and times of a dyslexic novelist here.
July 28, 2005
A Short Story for a Summer's Day
The House on the Bank of the River
Of course the river had once been tamer. The house was built then, and the sun porch years later, when still the land must have stretched languidly toward the river bank in a most appropriate fashion. There had been flower beds, and a plot of grass. The road in front would have been amenable. This was the unapproached edge of town until they extended the purlieus, and scores of hours could have been spent at a time without the passage of even a single car. It had been a narrow road, though once it began to grow, it spread quickly from one lane, to two, then four. The land on the riverside began to erode away. When we bought the house, it was wedged onto a narrow rectangular joke of a lot, bordered on either side of notable length by rushes, respectively, of automobiles and water.
We were sufficiently warned. Any house on the water for our budget was already telling. The real estate agent was honest about the problems, and the bank refused the mortgage. The place was referred to as both a death wish and money-pit. But the thing was, the price was so low we wouldn’t need a mortgage after all, and such short term economics have always made sense to me. My husband too. We wanted a house; we had spent 34 months living in a tent in Ghana and were craving walls, walls, walls, walls far more than we cared about the land.
That the walls were strong was never in doubt. It was a beautiful house, white with green shutters that needed painting when I first saw them. Inside was impeccably maintained, with polished wood floors, giant windows, high ceilings, airy rooms with bookshelves built into the walls. The sun porch was defiant, tacked onto the kitchen, standing high on stilts over the river. You could see the water going by through the narrow cracks between the beams in the wooden floor. The sun shone in from all angles. The house had been vacant for over a year, and the agent showed it, embarrassed with provisos. She was apologetic, but it was on the way to somewhere else we were supposed to go to and she thought it wouldn’t hurt to take a look.
We moved in three months later. We rented a van, and backed it into the driveway while the lights at the intersection were stopped on red and no cars were passing. The van could not be backed up very far and once the traffic began flowing again, cars were forced to swerve around its front third, which remained jutted awkwardly into the street. There was nothing we could do about that. We carried our boxes and furniture into the house with haste, the sooner we could go about unblocking the road.
It was the river everyone worried about, but really, traffic proved to be the biggest problem. We bought a car and I drove it to work every day, and every morning I sat, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel impatiently, awaiting a hole in the parade. No one ever let me in. If the lights were on my side, and left-hand turners were scarce, and I made it out of our driveway in under four minutes, it was going to be a good day. Once the power was out and the lights weren’t running at all, and I waited twelve minutes before just driving out finally, cutting someone off in the process and coming remarkably close to causing an accident, but avoiding it of course. I am a very good driver.
My husband didn’t have this problem. He rode his bike to work and minded the noise at night instead, which never bothered me because I sleep like I’m dead. We had chosen the bedroom at the back of the house for our own, aware that the din from the street would keep him up at night and also because the river view was the best. We had a row of windows along one entire wall. But the sounds of honking horns and slamming breaks seemed to travel long across the river, bouncing off the opposite bank and echo back right into our room. It sounded like the traffic was right outside the window, only if it really had been, the noise would have been louder.
The traffic was the annoyance but the river was a challenge. We’re the kind of people who fly into action when you tell us something can’t be done. My husband is very technical in an imaginative sort of way, and he drew up all kinds of sketches and plans. I like to build things, and together we were determined. Though we were not the first to embark upon this quest. The riverbank was littered with evidence of schemes that had failed before; broken beams to prop the place up, wire mesh to hold the earth together, concrete blocks now scattered in dead fragments along the riverbed.
My husband had a plan, which I supplemented with regular bursts of brilliance. We were going to construct a steel frame against the shoreline, packed with cement. The inches remaining on the edge of the earth and the perimeter of the house would be seeded to encourage strong and healthy soil. We set about it, and ran into all the problems you’d expect with zoning and practicality. How do you set cement amidst a swirling stream? We spend days in hip waders, the water overflowing into them, as we examined the solid foundations of our house against the fragility of the land on which it sat upon.
That summer, we dared the fierce and frightening storms, when the rain battled the windowpanes and the wind shook us both awake in our bed. It was a particularly brutal summer, each storm coming in on the tail of another, defying all statistical norms and predictions. It was amazing to watch the fury from our windows, the white caps, the lightning, and the sounds of the thunder splitting the night. The waves would slam against the bank again and again just below our bedroom windows and we imagined we felt the loss of each thin slice of land as they slowly washed away. One dark night we sat on the sun porch, though of course then there was no sun. There was only noise surrounding us and water splashing through the mesh screens that kept the bugs out. Eventually the rain and the waves began to soak us, but we couldn’t go inside. It was the best place to be in the middle of the storm, inside but yet not. We were only protected so far, and that risk was thrilling. The sun porch hovered over the water supported by its four wooden stilts and fast the wind blew. That gentle, steady sway amidst such a furious storm was surprising. The limbs of our structure were forced to stretch and flex, extending unnaturally further and further with each movement and we fully expected the entire thing would collapse. But we stayed there, huddled together wet in the middle of the maelstrom and we knew everything would be okay.
We had neighbours. Our house was one of four in a row, all built around the same time when the property they stood on was halfway desirable. Though we didn’t see our neighbours. All were white haired, in their seventies and eighties, and at least one of them had called the police once to complain about some of the work we were doing to prevent further erosion on the bank. No one had been over to say hello or welcome. We didn’t mind the isolation. In some ways, it had been an attractive feature of the place. For the longest time, the existence of our neighbours had failed to even register in our consciousness at all, until the night the place two down from ours took a final breath and then collapsed into the river, just like everyone had been predicting it would and I suppose there were some people puffed up with self-righteousness who met this news with glee.
No one was hurt. I read about it in the paper. The homeowner was a Mr. Braddock, a widower, and he’d been in the hospital during the storm that pulled the house he’d lived in for sixty-four years over the edge and into the river in pieces. This was said to be a blessing, even though Mr. Braddock was dying. The incident brought the rest of the houses on the river bank into a mid sized public spotlight, though comment was concerned primarily with public safety and the issue of erosion was scarcely mentioned. What kind of people insist on living in these places, these shabby little
lots wrought with danger? The other two houses remaining on our bank were torn down before the summer was out, their white-haired residents inevitably committed to some sort of institution or another.
But there was no such place for people like us. We stayed because it was ours and we had no other choice. We remained committed to saving the house, the first solid-walled structure we’d ever lived in together, and that meant something to us. We’ve never been the kind of people who respond well to orders. We stay, because until we’ve been proven wrong about this place we’ve found, we’ve been right all along, and there is security there. And there is , even on our spindly shaking limbs built not so high above tumult and torrent. I don’t know where it’s come from, but it’s here, in each other and the walls of this house we’ve built up together. We brave the storms and mind the daily inconveniences of this life, and other houses might fall off the edge of the earth, but ours just won’t. We’ve got to believe that.
(This story copyright Kerry Clare 2005)
July 27, 2005
Blair quote
“It’s time we stopped saying: ‘OK, abhor their methods, but we kind of see something in their ideas, or maybe they’ve got a sliver of excuse or justification’. They’ve got no justification for it.” So says Tony Blair and I completely agree. But I also don’t think anyone sane is justifying what terrorists have done, rather they’re pointing out the fact that the invasion of Iraq has done nothing to protect us from them, and really just made us more vulnerable.
July 27, 2005
Remembering where you were
The British Education secretary announces a 27 million pound scheme to give bags of free books to children up for four years. The Guardian reviews “Mediated: The Hidden Effects of the Media on You and Your World” by Thomas de Zengotit, which I read as a brilliant excerpt in Harpers last winter. This is a book of awareness, not conclusions, as the review states, and leaves you wondering, “If I am a sponge, an assemblage of images, sounds and influences, always looking out for my 15 minutes of fame, always rehearsing what I’ll say if a camera pokes its head round my doorway or a producer from reality television comes knocking with a contract, then where is the real me, the inner core, not the outer show?” The by now well documented story of how Stella’s groove was mislaid. Today I learned the word salubrious, which means healthy, good. Naomi Wolf compares a recent book about Mary Woolstonecraft to Edward Klein’s new biography of Hillary Clinton, both of which demonstrate “the collective unconscious of our culture at work, throwing up vivid, even lurid fantasies that emerge out of the shifting balance of power between women and men.” (The Klein book was excerpted in Vanity Fair recently, and it was godawful). And here is Daniel Clowes on his new book “Ice Haven.” In further news, I’ve started “Small Island” by Andrea Levy, and my allergy to lake water has resulted in something horrible occurring on my eyelid. Most importantly, today we bought a mattress.
July 25, 2005
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
We went to Hiroshima for the first time just over a year ago, and these were my thoughts at the time. “We’ve been talking about Hiroshima, because we’re going on Thursday and I am also reading The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock which is about the legacy of the atom bomb. I realise that this is another of those controversial issues in which if you have a decided opinion you believe in 100%, then you are most likely ignorant. The fact of Japan’s brutality in wartime is clear, and indeed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended WW2. And perhaps the sacrifice was worth the war’s end, and ended all of the other kinds of ongoing attacking and bombings. So that is that. But if you find any way to really completely excuse this act, beyond tired justifications, than I do not claim to understand your soul. Because when you see what this war did to people’s bodies, minds, homes and lives. When you see the complete and utter destruction, and the pain and suffering- there is no excuse and there never can be. Nothing anyone’s nation ever did justifies such infliction upon its citizens. But maybe it had to happen? We’ll never know otherwise. Having an opinion on this issue is not what’s important. What’s important is that in Hiroshima, we see the ugly heart of war and we know that nothing is worth that sort of fighting for. It should be an example to leaders that every other foreign policy besides war must be exercised. That you can’t attack on a whim, because this is what you end up with. That you are never going to convince a mother that her dead baby’s life was worth the cost of “freedom”. It’s hard to win dead hearts and minds. Through of the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been blessed with the most straightforward message- the writing is on the wall but no one is reading it. The act of war is a warcrime.”
The 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are nearing. The Guardian has published quite a few features about these events, particularly this and this. Today a lot of people are seeking justification for another war, and these articles demonstrate the danger of that.
