July 17, 2012

Mini Review: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

I’ve been trying to appreciate the British author Penelope Fitzgerald for so long, because she seems the kind of writer who’d be right up my alley, plus she’s admired by readers I revere. But the novels I’ve read so far have failed to take with me. I’ve read her novels contentedly enough, but then been baffled by what to make of their shapes, of their wholes in the end. The problem has not been hers but mine, I think, and I’ve really been quite determined to make our relationship work. And I think we may have finally had a breakthrough with her novel Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979. Which had several things working to its benefit, as a matter of fact. First, that I read it while I was away last weekend, and I do find the books I read on pleasant holidays are always better thought of than usual. And further, I found a London Tube Pass stuck in my copy, which I bought second-hand (and whose cover is less attractive than this one). It was a weekend pass from 2003, and I love the idea that someone had this book on their own holiday. And while the Underground doesn’t factor so much in this story which takes place on its backstreets and on the Thames, it is still such a London book and so the tube pass seemed like the perfect prize.

Offshore is a messing about in boats book, about a group of Londoners in the 1960s who make their homes on barges tied up on Battersea Reach (which, obviously, has changed a bit since then). The boats are all in rough shape, their residents as unsteady in their lives as on land. The exception to this is Richard who has far more choice about where to live than the others, but takes to his boat anyway, The Lord Jim, much to the consternation of his wife Laura. He finds himself attracted to his neighbour Nenna James, who lives on Grace with her two precocious daughters who delighted me. Nenna’s husband has left her, and she’s unsure of how to get him back, or whether she wants to, which is not to say that she doesn’t love him, but she loves living on Grace most of all, even if she realizes that the precarious state of her life at the present has left her daughters troublingly vulnerable.

There is also Maurice, the male prositute who’s sheltering stolen goods in his barge for a shady character who’ll bring ill-fortune to the community, and Willis , a marine artist, whose boat is full of holes and who is hoping to get it sold while the tide is out so that nobody notices. And Nenna’s daughters, Tilda and Martha who swagger around the gangplanks, searching for treasure when the tide is out so they can buy Cliff Richard records, and who refuse to go to school because the nuns make a point of praying for them, for their father to come home.

The plot is small, but every gesture is inspired, with meaning. And often, even in its meaninglessness, the way life goes. One thing can happen, and then another, and another, with no connection between them except that each makes everything a little worse, and I thought of this when Nola is left without her purse and then is assaulted and has her shoes stolen so that she ends up coming home with bleeding feet. In its meaningless, the world is mean, but then there is illumination by human character and genuine connections between people, those moments when these people who are each adrift spy light upon the shore.

The ending is abrupt and unsettling, and reminded me of maybe why I don’t like Penelope Fitzgerald after all. For why can’t she tuck her characters safely into bed at the end of the story, on settled weather on dry land, but then that’s not how her books go, nor how life goes either. And I make sense of all of this with an analogy as to how I came to love the short story, by not yearning for more than what the author can give but making sense of that gift instead, of its limits. And acknowledging that it’s a powerful story after all whose characters are not finished with final page, that an author who gives us this really does give us something of enormous value.

And the the point is that Offshore‘s people are never going to find their proper moorings, really, which is the point of Offshore‘s people, of the Thames itself, running softly:

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

July 17, 2012

Downtown kids

We do a lot of documenting and celebrating urban family life here at Pickle Me This, usually through a literary lens. Our family is quite passionate about engaging with the city, which is why we’ve been re-enacting Allan Moak’s A Big City Alphabet for the past year and a half. See also recent post Great City Picture Books and last year’s On urban picture books and concepts of home. We love the city so much that we don’t just live here–we read here too.

Last week, it was suggested that downtown Toronto is not an appropriate place for families, for children to grow up. I don’t actually think the suggestion pertained to leafy residential streets like mine, but we’re still downtown, don’t have a lick of sod (though the front garden is amazing), and we’re removed from the ground. And it’s a good life, with so many opportunities for every-day adventures. Clearly, other parents agree, which is why the Downtown Kids tumblr is such a delight to read. A compilation of letters from people who are raising kids all over the city, the site is a celebration of neighbourhoods, of city parks, storekeepers who know your name, and wonderful things like free-range pianos, museums, ferry-boats and community gardens.

Instead of writing off certain areas for family life, I do wonder how much better off we’d all be if we worked to make sure that everywhere was an appropriate place for kids to grow. I don’t think the kids would be alone in benefitting.

July 16, 2012

Letters were no longer brought by the postman

“…letters were no longer brought by the postman; after he had fallen twice from Maurice‘s ill-secured gangplank, the whole morning’s mail soaked in the great river’s load of rubbish, the GPO, with every reason on its side, had notified the Reach that they could no longer undertake deliveries. They acknowledged that Mr. Black, from Lord Jim, had rescued their employee on both occasions and they wished to record their thanks for this. The letters, since this, had had to be collected from the boatyard office, and Laura felt this made it not much better than living abroad. ” –from Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

July 15, 2012

Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the 6th read

I do make a point of often rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but mostly because it’s just that quite often I get the urge to do so. And it’s usually summer when I do, like last week on the coattails of Valery The Great. I read Slouching last in 2010, and wrote quite a bit about it. This time, my reading around was coloured by having read Didion’s new book Blue Nights last fall. I’ve already written about how much her new book is a response to the voice we hear throughout this book, to her 32/33 year-old self who imagines (in “Goodbye To All That”) that she’ll never be so young again, who has figured that “someday it all comes” and that it even stays.

And yes, it’s jarring to encounter Slouching… with the perspective of Blue Nights. I’d never thought about Quintana in the context of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” essay, but I wondered where she’d been, and noticed Didion herself in the essay more than I ever had before: “Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable.” I think of the simplistic way that Quintana herself is described in so many of these essays: “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” Quintana was one when that essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” was written. It’s so odd that the normally astute Didion would ever imagine that any person, especially in their infancy, could be so known.

I reread this book with the perspective of Mad Men too, and Lucille Maxwell Miller in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” came right out of the world, even on the opposite coast. Same with the “Slouching…” essay, the disintegration the show begins to grapple with in Season 5, which ends with the beginning of 1967. And yes, this essay reminded me of the present too, as it probably ever will, but even more than it did when I read it two years ago:

“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snaked shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”

I understand the “Personals” essays better and differently every time. I love “Notes from a Native Daughter” which is a preview of one of my favourite Didion books, 2002’s Where I Was From. I continue to find “The Seacoast of Despair” completely incomprehensible, every single one of its references a blank space for me.

And, mostly profoundly, I think I have finally grown out of “Goodbye to All That”. I still think it’s as lovely as I ever did, but it no longer makes me want to hang yards of yellow silk from my windows and cry in Chinese laundries. I no longer think it’s romantic. It’s dawned upon me that the voice of experience in that piece is still so absolutely, so tenderly young. Blue Nights, of course, emphasized this point, but I probably would have seen it anyway. I still love the part where she writes, “I would stay in New York, I told him, for just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed for eight years.”

But I’m started to realize that who we were at 23 means less and less as we get older, and that the decade we traverse to get to 33 is still absolutely nothing compared to the journey just beginning. That we shall be made so young and stripped of our illusions over and over again.

July 11, 2012

Valery the Great by Elaine McCluskey

“He loved the feel of a paperback tucked in his back pocket like an overflowing wallet,” is a line that turns up on the first page of Elaine McCluskey’s Valery the Great, the first paragraph even, and it had me thinking (rightly) that here is a book I would love. McCluskey’s stories are glimpses, conversations overheard, and collected they create a walking tour of small-town Maritime life. Her voice is scathing, very funny, her stories twisting at the end to leave me a bit stunned. And their stucture– you just hold on for dear life with no clue where the stories will take you, and sometimes you want to avert your eyes, but you can’t help looking, looking so hard you hardly know what comes next.

Here is a book that left me wanting to reread Joan Didion, because of how McCluskey similarly lays the facts out, the details pointing the way and never meaning what you think they mean. There is a similar coldness too, a brutality, but it’s easier to take, of course, because McCluskey is very funny at the same time, has a delicious feel for the absurd. I read Ramona Dearing’s collection So Beautiful recently, and McCluskey’s approach is similar. Both authors have a terrific ability to get into all manner of heads.

The book begins with Floyd Barkhouse, he of the back pocket paperback, media liaison for the Wahoo Volunteer Search and Rescue Team, who’s been feeling a bit redundant in the empty weeks since anybody’s needing searching or rescuing. The story, “The Favourite Nephew”, captures the sinister edge to a not-so-simple picture of rural life. “Maurice” follows a dwarf boxing manager from childhood to old age, contains the line, “No wonder I punched so many guys in the mouth. Half the bastards probably deserved it.” “Little Eric” is an unlikely love story, from the perspective of a loyal donut shop patron (and with an ending that made my heart soar).

And speaking of endings, oh, the title story, abouta  a figure skater from a New Brunswick city (a place with one legion hall and a curling club) who ends up travelling with the Russian Circus on Ice (with two bears), humour and heartbreak entwined, and you never do see the  GMC Suburban coming. And then the ending to “I Visited the Grand Canyon”, about a woman who’s cataloguing former boyfriends for a reason that will leave you in need of recovery. The ending of “Blossom” is the best punchline ever.

There’s a lot of death and injury in these stories, even murder. But then McCluskey tap dances around the tragedy in a glorious spectacle, and the routine is beautiful. Her characters are downtrodden, dealing with their own problems by taking it out on others. Two characters are small-town newspaper reporters who seek distraction in mundanity from the problems of their own lives. Young people who use sport as a vehicle to get into the world, but then the vehicles run out of gas. There are clandestine affairs and intrigue, keen younger brothers and stupid sidekicks. Plus a story named after Maury Povich, a boy whose fate is to receive Tupac-related gifts every birthday, and references to Twitter and Facebook (and how death is handled in the latter) which makes these stories seem so right now.

I loved this book, a short story collections whose curation had as much thought put into it as the stories themselves, a fantastic package with a gorgeous design. In addition to considerable talent, there is furious energy at work here, McCluskey giving it her all, and as a result, reading was a pleasure.

July 11, 2012

Blooming

Five summers ago, we had the most extraordinary garden, and grew tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis, watermelon, and lettuce, and more, although, regrettably, the carrots didn’t take. When we moved to our new apartment the following year, however, we learned that we actually had not a green thumb among us, and that our garden’s greatness was mostly due to soil worked for years by Portuguese residents who’d lived there before us. We tried growing some veggies in pots on our deck, but we were thwarted by nasty squirrels and lack of sunlight, and so we just stuck to impatiens.

That this year has been different, like all our gardening adventures, has been mostly an accident. While on our annual impatiens-shop, I picked up a cherry tomato plant for the hell of it, definitely not optimistic. I decided I’d tried to grow some basil again, so I threw in one of those plants too. And then Harriet planted beans in a cup in April, in wet paper towel, and they sprouted, so we planted them.

The impatiens have done as well as ever. (They are indestructible.) The tomato plant is enormous and yielding a fantastic crop, though Harriet totally lied when she said she would eat them. The basil never stops, and I can make a batch of pesto once a week. Harriet’s paper towel beans even have beans of their own, though I’m not sure what one does with mung beans other than plant them back in paper towel. And now I wished that we’d gardened a bit harder back in May, though if we had, no doubt, we would have been disappointed. There is nothing our garden hates more than deliberateness, so we’ll play the game. We’ve got our tomatoes.

The whole summer is in bloom– we even had peaches at the market today. It’s the most delicious time of the year.

July 9, 2012

Acquainted With the Night by Christopher Dewdney

I’m not sure if last Friday evening was necessarily so enchanted, or if I noticed the enchantment in particular because I was reading Christopher Dewdney’s Acquainted With the Night. It was hot out, the city with all its doors and windows flung open, and we’d just come home from an evening swim at Christie Pits, where I would have liked to stay and watch the darkrise, as Dewdney notes that Christie Pits is a prime viewing location, but alas, we had a little one to put to bed. And once she was put to bed, we sat out on our porch catching whatever we could of an evening breeze, and we could hear our downstairs neighbours in the yard below us, and similar sounds from backyards and front porches up and down the street, the city alive with murmurs and bursts of laughter.

I read Christopher Dewdney’s Soul of the World last year, and delighted in its breadth. Acquainted With the Night is a previous book, but a similar approach, Dewdney taking a commonplace idea and illuminating its extraordinary and unknown aspects, tying together science, philosophy, literature, art, history and particle physics. So yes, it’s non-fiction, which means that I’ve spent most of the last week greeting friends with, “So, did you know that an owl can’t move its eyes in their sockets and that’s why their heads swivel round?”

Dewdney takes us through the night, hour by hour, discussing the physics of sunset, just why the night is dark, the night as portrayed in the works of Maurice Sendak, or in the adventures of nocturnal animals. Then onwards to the revolutionary advent of streetlamps, of night shifts, the science of sleep, of dreams and nightmares (and did you know that its possible for your nightmares to kill you?). On creatures of the night from Frankenstein’s monster to UFOs, to constellations and their accompanying stories, to insomnia and moonshine (and moonshine). The only thing I missed was a bit about the worst night-shift ever, which is sitting in a rocking chair holding a tiny bundle of baby in your arms whose wide-open saucer eyes refuse to fucking close.

To read Dewdney is to take a leisurely stroll with the smartest man you ever knew. He grounds the book in his narrator’s voice, this guiding character appearing in and out of the text to take the your hand and guide your through, giving the impression that this book which is seemingly about absolutely everything is also about the individual person and the experience of being in the world.

July 8, 2012

Wild Libraries I Have Known: Wychwood (TPL Branch)

Last week, Harriet was enrolled in day camp in the mornings, which gave me some time to get a lot of work done and the opportunity to fall in love with a new wild library. Wychwood Library has a fascinating history, with origins as part of a tanning factory the late 19th century. In 1904, most of the library’s volumes were destroyed by fire, except for those loaned out to patrons (and thank heaven for the overdue ones). In the years following, the library was housed in the local fire hall, and at Wychwood/Hillcrest School. When Wychwood District was annexed to the City of Toronto in 1909, the library joined the Toronto Public Library system. In 1915, the Carnegie Corporation granted $50,000 to the TPL to build 3 identical libraries, of which Wychwood would be one along with Beaches and High Park.

The library’s design is stunning and smart. The first floor children’s area is spacious, bright, full of things to look at, and so many books. The second floor is a site of scholastic reverence, a grand hall with a timber roof that is 29 metres at its highest point. Sun pours in through the windows, the library is buzzing with patrons of all sorts, pages flipped and keyboards clacking. Community notices are posted all over the place. The grand fireplace lends a touch of warmth and home.

I spent the week working up in the rafters, taking in the atmosphere and studying the spider-webs (which were beautiful). I claimed a carrel on the small balcony at the west end of the building, and whenever I looked up from my work I was granted a view of the most stunning vista. It was a tremendously productive week, partly because 3 years of motherhood have shown me that not a second of 10 hours of time to work should over be put to waste, but also because my surroundings spurred me on. Wychwood seemed a proper place in which to think, to work, to get things done.

And it’s a wonderful thing about libraries, isn’t it, the way they can offer themselves to us for a little while. Their doors open to strangers, people just passing through, how the words I wrote last week will forever be set there.

July 8, 2012

Changing the furniture

As you can see, we’ve been changing the furniture around here, and I’m rather ecstatic about this new arrangement. I wanted something simple and light, but to still retain my door motif. The gorgeous red door above, complete with mailbox, has come from the talented artist Patricia Storms, and the site’s design, as ever, is courtesy of Stuart. And I especially love that my footer is actually feet, those red wellingtons that were my header years and years ago. Who says that websites don’t have history?

July 5, 2012

The Village of Many Hats by Caroline Woodward

I wanted to read Caroline Woodward’s middle-grade novel The Village of Many Hats because I loved her picture book Singing Away the Dark, and I was curious as to see how her talent would translate. So I was pleased to find that everything I loved about Singing Away… was present here in this story of a small community surrounded by nature in the Kootenays, whose spirit refuses to be permeated by economic hardship, a novel whose heart is a young girl who knows that bravery is not the absence of fear, but instead fear harnessed.

While Gina’s young sister Sara awaits heart surgery at the children’s hospital in Vancouver, Gina tries to keep things together at home and be strong in support of her family. She finds distraction in a part-time job working in a new shop in town whose proprietor is the creator of stunning hats made of recycled materials, which seem to bring strength to their wearers. And when tragedy strikes and the village Hall is damaged in a fire, the residents of Silverado need their hats more than ever.

Woodward has written about the book’s inspiration, and how it also served as a fundraiser for the Reading Centre in New Denver BC. I’m not sure a book itself has ever been able to practice what it preaches, but this one did, underlining my appreciation for this lovely and affirming story of community togetherness.