June 11, 2012
The best literature this country has ever produced
From my letter to my Member of Parliament and Minister James Moore regarding the federal government’s cessation of funding to the Literary Press Group of Canada:
“Canadian presses are right now publishing some of the best literature this country has ever produced. If you aren’t already familiar with titles such as Darcie Hossack’s Mennonites Don’t Dance (Thistledown Press, also nominated for Commonwealth Writers Prize), Billeh Nickerson’s Impact: The Titanic Poems (Arsenal Pulp Press), Madeleine Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures (Anvil Press, also nominated for Charles Taylor Prize), Daniel Griffin’s Stopping for Strangers (Vehicule Press, shortlisted for Frank O’Connor and Danuta Gleed awards), Mad Hope by Heather Birrell (Coach House Press), Mnemonic: A Book of Trees by Theresa Kishkan (Goose Lane Editions), The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (Gaspereau Press, winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize), I’m a Registered Nurse… by Anne Perdue (Insomniac Press), and Monoceros by Suzette Mayr (Coach House Press, nominated for 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize), which are only some of the best books I’ve read lately, then I suggest you seek them out. And then you will understand my concern about the LPG funding cut, and about how much we all stand to lose as a result.”
The matter is urgent. If you support Canadian readers, Canadian books, and Canadian writers, please write your MP and tell her/him so.
June 8, 2012
A bouquet of maple leaves
Taking these books back to the library today, and realizing that they do reveal a bit of a pattern in my borrowing habits.
June 7, 2012
Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know
From an excellent post by Laurel Snyder on the dangers of turning on to chapter books too soon:
“Picture books are the most wild, innovative, untethered, experimental literary genre I know.
The marriage of images and text is partly to blame for this, I think. Something about the collaborative process too, perhaps—an artist and a writer challenging each other, with a common purpose but different modes. But I want to believe that the main reason picture books can be so different is that kids are so different.
At the tender age when kids first encounter picture books they are open, accepting, free-thinking. A two year old doesn’t really expect anything when she picks up a book, and so a book for a two year old can be anything. Physical comedy. Visual art. A puzzle. Books for kids can pop-up or scratch-and-sniff. They can be meta-fiction. They can speak multiple languages or intertwine multiple distinct storylines. There are almost no rules to picture books. Kids scribble in them, build forts with them. Picture books are experiential on every level you can imagine, and some you can’t.
They’re awesome.”
June 7, 2012
Never Mind the Patriarchy Part 2: Myrl Coulter and Helen Potrebenko
Last week, I read Myrl Coulter’s The House With the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers, a memoir of Coulter’s experiences growing up in Winnipeg and being forced to give up her son for adoption in 1968 when she finds herself pregnant. Like Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which I enjoyed so much, Coulter shows “what happens when individual lives collide with their particular historical moments.” Unmarried and a teenager, Coulter was sent away from her family and community to live at one of those ubiquitous maternity homes while she waited to have her baby. As an unwed mother, she was treated by disdain at the hospital where her son was born, and expected to move on with her life after the fact as if the story had never happened.
Unsurprisingly, this moving on proves difficult, and the memoir goes on to show how Coulter carried her experience inside her for so many years in silence. Looking back, she questions how her parents could have let it happen, could have sent her away, could have let her give away her son. Eventually, years and lifetimes later, she and her son are reunited, and she’s forthright about the complicated nature of their relationship, and also about her anger at Canada’s closed adoption system that manipulated and wronged so many young woman just like her.
She writes, “…the feminist version of me… was born on a dark night in 1968 when I gave birth to my first child alone in a big crowded hospital. I knew at last that my feminism stems from the invisibility society demanded for unwed mothers back then; I knew that my sense of agency was born in a social order that dictated no one should stop to offer comfort to a frightened eighteen-year-old girl in labour simply because she wasn’t married… I knew.. that being a feminist and being a mother are inevitably connected, like fetus and placenta.” With excellent writing and perfect detail, Coulter paints a rather stark picture of life “back then”, though all of us who have ever been pregnant by mistake are well-aware that the experience carries a devastating stigma to this day.
There was no reason why I picked up Helen Potrebenko’s TAXI! to read next, except that both books had come in at the library at the very same time. But, as in my first Never Mind the Patriarchy experience in March, random books brought forth remarkable connections. Once again, I was reading a book that Anakana Schofield had recommended, this time TAXI!, which Schofield calls her “favourite Vancouver novel” (and you can believe it). It’s the story of Shannon, a female taxi driver in Vancouver during 1971 and 1972. The episodic novel follows Shannon as she philosophizes and longs for revolution, driving the streets of Vancouver with various down-and-outs and scumbags throwing up in her backseat.
Says Shannon, “There are so so few choices for women. They’ve got you in a cage. If you’re bad they tighten the bars around you so you’ve got no space at all. They they give you back the original cage and call that freedom.”
It’s a funny book, but timeless in a way that is tragic. Protesters erect tent cities in local parks, unions are striking, there is social unrest, not enough jobs for young people, and there’s a war going on. “The first time Shannon drove cab drunk out of her mind was the Christmas after the War Measures Act.” TAXI! could have been written yesterday, which is a mark for Helen Potrebenko, but bad luck for the rest of us. Shannon herself would probably not be so surprised, having never suffered any illusions about progress.
June 6, 2012
To market, to market
The market opened today, and it was a glorious bounty, perhaps due to our early spring. It was wonderful to see so many familiar faces, people we know from the neighbourhood and farmers we haven’t seen since last October who commented on how enormous Harriet has grown in the meantime. And it’s true– this time last year, I had to wear Harriet on my back to the market or else she’d escape, and then she’d scream whenever it was time to leave, and I think she got a bad reputation. Today, however, she stood at my side like an actual human being, and it was so exciting to see strawberries, beets, garlic scapes, cherry tomatoes, and kale, plus say hello to our favourite maple syrup and honey men. It is very nice to say hello to summer again, and also to see how far we’ve come.
June 5, 2012
Library Owl
While I am quite familiar with the griffin and the lion flanking the entrance to the Lillian H. Smith Library, it was only today that I discovered the owl. It’s on the front of the building toward the west end, sort of hidden behind a sign on the sidewalk and I’d never noticed it before as I charged along the sidewalk, stroller in hand, hurrying home in time for lunch and nap-time. But Harriet has taken to walking, and as a result, our routes along the sidewalk have become much more meandering. Which is kind of annoying, but how brilliant when it yields a treasure. I have no doubt that wandering with Harriet will improve my city sight.
And just when I thought the Lillian H. Smith Library couldn’t be any more wonderful…
More: Joan Bodger and the Lillian H. Smith Library (see final paragraphs)
June 4, 2012
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
“Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-Enchantment” was an essay by Patricia Robertson in Canadian Notes & Queries 84, in which Robertson decried contemporary writers in general for their failure to imagine the world beyond the individual, and the failure of contemporary writing to be anything but tedious. Hers was an inspiring argument, even stirring, and yet… I’m not yet tired of the kind of novel she’s maligning. Domesticated fiction remains what I most want to read, and I’m not nearly finished with it yet. And I don’t even have a good argument as to why this should be the case, except that I think that with the reader taking an imaginative leap, domesticated fiction can do as well as the fantastic, or any other kind of literature, to “incorporate some of the wildness, the strangeness, the mystery of the world around us.” To show that we are indeed “participants in a vast web of being.”
And all this is preamble to the fact that tonight is the night Jeffrey Eugenides has been freaking out about for ages, the night I give my two cents on his latest novel The Marriage Plot (which my husband gave me for Christmas, I’ll have you know. How domesticated is that?). My Jeffrey Eugenides backgrounder is this: I think I tried to read The Virgin Suicides once, but couldn’t; I thought the movie was really weird; I liked Middlesex a lot, except for the part where Cal joined the circus, because in those parts, the novel wasn’t domesticated anymore. All of which suggests that I come to The Marriage Plot with a lot less Eugenides-related baggage than the average avid reader. But I come to it hesitantly all the same because I’d heard reports of reader dissatisfaction, because I’m allergic to hype, and because the novel sports all these allusions to literary theory and David Foster Wallace, and I know as much about one as the other, which is nothing.
But then I started to read it, the first line: “To start with, look at all the books.” And then Eugenides describes the contents of Madeleine Hanna’s bookshelves, and then it was clear that he’d written this novel just for me. It begins the morning of Madeleine’s graduation as she’s still dealing with fallout from the breakup of her relationship with Leonard and runs into an old friend Mitchell who’s sweet on her and who only makes her angry. The plot swoops back and forth from past to present, and it’s true that here is one of these books where everything that happens has happened already, but how I admire Eugenides’ command of chronology and all the details. Though the details themselves are not the point, instead the plot is. On one level (and there are several) the novel is an exercise as to whether 19th century romance/marriage plots can work in a 20th century story, and I come away from the book assured that they always have.
The Marriage Plot is social satire, academic satire, a bookish orgy, and the most beautiful celebration of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline that I’ve ever come across in a 400 page novel written by a man. Yes, there were times when I skimmed, allusions that went over my head, and did read the book a little wide-eyed, a bit too eager to attribute significance at every turn. That the 1982 “Cosby-sweater” reference could not be an anachronism surely, and that Eugenides, with some kind of ironic gesture, had planted it there for a reason. And even if he hadn’t, it was planted all the same, and the text was a different place for it.
Eugenides shows that there is no torture quite like life in one’s early-twenties, regardless of the century. Here is the story of the most world’s most scalene love triangle, and the angles mean more than the love does. Manic-depressive Leonard with the tortured background who captivates the romantic Madeleine in a semiotics class, and Mitchell who is convinced that Madeleine is meant to be his wife but she’s having none of it (except for drunken gropings here and there). The first two become inextricably tangled and love doesn’t have so much to do with it. Meanwhile Mitchell is off on his grand tour, culminating in an experience volunteering at Mother Theresa’s mission in Calcutta, and he’s thinking maybe he’s a religious mystic but suspecting that this isn’t the case. He’s become obsessed with The Jesus Prayer and insists that Franny Glass has got nothing to do with it. All the time that Leonard and Madeleine are cracking up and up, and then she and Mitchell meet up again at a party a year after their graduation…
And that ending, so perfect. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but Reader, she says, “Yes.”
May 31, 2012
Franklin Stamps
There is not much we love at our house more than we love mail and books (except perhaps for bunting, tea, and train journeys) and it’s always a joy when worlds collide. Yesterday, we picked up a set of Franklin the Turtle stamps at the post office, and we’re in love with them. But they confuse us too, because Harriet thinks they’re stickers and wants to stick them all over her hands and legs, and as for me, I can’t see myself using them anytime soon because then we wouldn’t have them anymore!
More about postal goodness: the joy of postcards.
