September 25, 2011

The Vicious Circle reads Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Vicious Circle rocked The Junction last Thursday night, sitting out on a porch that was deep enough for all of us, on a September night that was warm enough to still be summer (until it got dark, and the chill set in, but it still wasn’t too bad at all). We begin with Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and the character of Margaret. That she shows Amis’ limitations in creating female characters, and some of us were offended that she turned out to be such a manipulative, conniving minx, though others though her manipulative, connivingness at least showed a bit of agency and made her a less pathetic character (and just as hateful, therefore, as everybody around her). We weren’t sure exactly who she was– she was mousy in her spectacles, though she also flirts with beads and an arty wardrobe. Clearly Margaret is trying it on as much as anybody else is. Though Christine isn’t, or when she is, she’s covering up something more appealing– we note that she’s described as “unmanningly beautiful”, and that she takes on typical male roles in their relationship, and that she threatens him with her strength– we wonder if they’ll actually end up together? Also, we loved Carol Goldsmith, who underlines that Jim, sexually, is still an adolescent.

We thought the book was hilarious– Dixon’s unfortunate phone calls to Mrs. Welch in particular. Those of us in the know remarked that Amis’s send-up of academia was spot-on. Though we couldn’t figure out if Professor Welch was as dotty as he seemed– was there method to his madness? Was he an older version of Jim? Though we decided that he probably wasn’t because dotty or not, he did have passion for what he did, whereas Jim had passion for nothing.

We talked a lot about class– about how this slapstick comedy works in Britain in a way we’d find much less amusing if it were American. Jim Carrey as Lucky Jim, somebody noted, would be unbearably horrible, whereas Hugh Grant might be able to pull it off. We wondered why the cultural differences in terms of comedy, and determined that Britain is so firmly entrenched in a class system that there are so many more inviolable rules for characters to transgress. Hence the humour. Though one of us would point out that the American comedy that comes closest is the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

So what about class and Lucky Jim Dixon? What’s his background? He only mentions his parents briefly when he laments that he has not parents such as Bertrand Welch’s who’d put him up in a London flat. We learn that the universities are being opened up due to scholarship programs, and this is probably how Jim got there, though it’s pointed out that this expanded population has resulted in a lowered tone. Jim was in the war, was stationed well out of the way of battle up in Scotland, which is typical really for how things go, but it also means he’s never had a chance to prove himself (or be killed with a bullet blast). We thought about him in comparison with Arthur Seaton, a literary contemporary from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning— that both characters are locked in where they don’t belong. Then there’s Amis and the angry young men– Sillitoe’s Seaton was a bit of a departure from the other’s though, due to Sillitoe’s own working class origins.

Is class then the focus, that Jim is where he doesn’t belong? That he’s dared to transgress the bounds of his working class origins, and as a result he belongs nowhere. Though what is the class of the other characters, one of us asked? Do they necessarily come from better backgrounds, and it’s suggested that they don’t. That academia is rife with misfits, and Jim is a misfit amongst them, or outside of them, rather.

Though in Jim’s own words, “I’m afraid that’s a tall order. Explain my conduct; now, that is asking something. I can’t think of anybody who’d be quite equal to that task.” And from this we took that it’s possible to read into this book too much, that it’s really comedy at its heart, one ridiculous action after another, unstoppable once the wheels were in motion. That at his own heart, Jim’s an idiot, a passive and lazy asshole. We wondered about the title because so many unfortunate incidents happen upon Jim that we’re not sure how he could possibly be “lucky”, but he is, and the ending proves it. That he was on the right trajectory from the start: “It was luck you needed all along; with just a little more luck he’d have been able to switch his life to a momentarily adjoining track, a track destined to swing aside at once away from his own.”

Really, then, is this a book about faith?

September 25, 2011

Word on the Street: in the bookmobile!

Though it shames me to say it, we take Word on the Street a bit for granted in our family. Partly because the street in question is ten minutes down the street from our house, and also because we live and breathe books 365 days a year, and so it’s rare that a WOTS vendor can tell me something I don’t know already, or sell me something that I don’t want already. The second point being most important today, as after Eden Mills and the Vic Book sale, I’m all book-bought out. I have too many books, and I’ve spent a lot of money, plus I have a complex about visiting vendors’ booths at WOTS and not buying their wares. So I stayed back from the booths this year, and checked out some readings. Mostly just soaked up the vibe from the bookish crowd, and it was fantastic. We had a wonderful time, and the highlight was the Toronto Public Library Bookmobile, a marriage of Harriet’s two great loves of busses and books. It was the best, best bus we’ve ever boarded, and never has checking out books been more of a novelty. Almost as thrilling as when Harriet would meet Chirp about five minutes later. We had a wonderful afternoon.

September 24, 2011

Vic Book Sale 2011

There are not words for how amazing was my haul from this year’s Victoria College Book Sale. Though I did not do as I intended, which was to buy only books from a list of titles I was looking for. From the list, I found one: Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love, because I’ve never met anyone smart who didn’t revere it. The rest I couldn’t help but pick up alongside it, and I’m so pleased with my selections– I didn’t make the mistake of buying aspirationally, or picking more battered paperbacks condemned to sit unread on my shelf a half-decade.

The only problem is that I am still determined to get through that unread shelf that I’ve been plowing through for the past six months– they’re in alpha-order by author, and I’ve read up to K so far. And in order for these books to continue to be read, I’ve decided not to read a single one of these delicious new selections until the shelf is empty. Which is a bit torturous, actually, but also very good incentive.

Books got: Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin (which I’ve read already, but has been missing from my library), A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam, The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope, Stupid Boys are Good to Relax With by Susan Swan (I read this when I was in university, and hoping the title might justify my lifestyle at the time), Fables of Brunswick Avenue by Katherine Govier (we don’t live on Brunswick, but we do live about 30 metres from it), Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald who I am determined to learn to appreciate, The Temporary by Rachel Cusk who is Rachel Cusk after all and I love everything she touches, You Never Know by Isabel Huggan who I’ve never read. I actually wanted The Elizabeth Stories but didn’t find them– have been interested since Elizabeth Hay’s recommendation on Canadian Bookshelf, I got The Rosedale Hoax by Rachel Wyatt which was pubbed by Anansi in 1977 and which I learned about from Amy Lavender Harris’s book Imagining Toronto, Elspeth Cameron’s memoir No Previous Experience, Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven, Saving Rome by Megan K. Williams which my book club is reading next month, Ali Smith’s collection The First Person, Caroline Adderson’s novel Sitting Practice, and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Elements of Style.

And in about 40-some books’ time, I’ll be permitted to read them!

September 23, 2011

Envelopes by Harriet Russell

As any bookish person would, I spent much of Heather Birrell‘s daughter’s birthday party a few weeks back examining the family bookshelves (while HB led the kids in a round of Pass the Parcel). I was, naturally, interested to discover Harriet Russell‘s book Envelopes, which combines my two great passions of Harriets and the postal system, and the book did not disappoint. Harriet Russell is an artist who came upon the greatest idea ever, which is to send letters to herself with cryptically addressed envelopes requiring a postal worker to solve her puzzles.

As Lynn Truss writes in her foreward to the book, “each envelope… is also a triumph of humanity– because, after all, in nearly every case, the letter arrived! Therefore a human person must have worked out Harriet’s code, or enjoyed the conceit, or (at the very least) held the envelope at arm’s length, recognising the handiwork of that annoyign woman in that flat on Montague street.”

Eventually, the postal workers started writing, “Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre” on the backs of the envelopes, and their own annotations in the process of solving the puzzles are, as Russell writes, “[now] a real part of the work, adding an extra element that would not be there had they not participated.”

I think my favourite envelope was one made from an old map of London with an X, and the note, “Please deliver here. This is a very old map and the street used to be called Grand Junction.” Also, the drawing of the house with a note reading, “Please deliver to the house pictured”. The address is hidden in a crossword puzzle, connect the dots, colour by number, shopping lists, excerpts from a dictionary, a script from a play, a photograph, a menu, musical notation, and the periodic table of elements. Etc. Etc.

Cover to cover delight.

September 23, 2011

Weaned

At the age of 2 and one quarter and a bit, Harriet is now officially weaned, which I’m telling you now for a couple of reasons. The first is that I truly enjoying horrifying the kind of people who become horrified by the fact that I’ve breastfed for so long. The second reason is because it’s quite a milestone, and I don’t like the idea of breastfeeding having to be a private thing, business that I keep to myself for fear of horrifying somebody (except when I want to horrify someone, as previously noted), because it really is of the mundane essential stuff of life that I write about on my blog all the time. And the third reason I raise the topic here is because breastfeeding was always when I got my periodical reading done, and the loss of this reading time each day now means that I’ve got magazines piling up in my house at a terrifying rate. Plus it’s September, which means there is a new release out basically every day that I’m meaning to getting around to read, and the Victoria College Book Sale is this weekend (which is, as many of you know, the thing I enjoy in the world more than anything else at all except Afternoon Tea). So there will be books, books and more books, and now I’m a bit terrified at the prospect of my leaning tower of magazines.

September 22, 2011

Our Best Book from the library haul: Me… Jane by Patrick McDonnell

Patrick McDonnell’s Me… Jane is the story of an ordinary little girl with a stuffed chimpanzee who just happens to grow up to be Jane Goodall. Significant for being the first biography Harriet’s ever encountered, it also stands up on its own merits as a picture book with delightful illustrations of little Jane getting up to adventures ordinary (sneaking into the hen house to watch hens laying eggs) and extraordinary (Jane imagining herself like Jane from the Tarzan stories swinging on vines through the jungles of Africa). The story awakes its reader to the “magical world full of joy and wonder”, and also tells tells the inspiring story of a little who dared to dream big and whose dreams came true.

In addition to McDonnell’s sweet cartoon rendering of Jane and all the animals, the text pages are enhanced by gorgeous scientific drawings of plants, insects, and other animals. Most remarkable are the samples of Jane Goodall’s own juvenilia,  including official documents from a childhood club called “The Aligator Society”.

The end of the book contains a detailed “About Jane Goodall” section and even “A Message from Jane”, which urges that “the life of each one of us matters in the scheme of things”. From even the littlest stories come great things. Or maybe the message is more that even great things have little stories at the heart of them.

September 20, 2011

Another Belfast Man Doing Well

I found this on the ground on Saturday, and basically think it’s an entire novel condensed to a post-it note. Who is Harry? What kind of job did Steve and Paul do exactly? (I suspect dry-walling). Is Harry the Belfast man doing well? Can we take this to mean that Jim is a fellow well-doing Belfast man, or is he just someone who collects such people? How much is Rosemary really invested in the situation anyway? What was this note stuck to before it was so carelessly discarded? What’s Harry’s connection to Steve and Paul? And could there be any other names as archetypal as Harry, Steve, Paul, and Jim and Rosemary? Is this note not a throwback to a bygone age? Except for the pink post-it, of course. The pink post-it is very much of now.

September 19, 2011

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

The bad news about Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter is that she’s preaching to the choir here. My husband and I both read this book, and came away more than ever firmly entrenched that girlie/princess culture is bad news for little girls. And not just because of the limited nature of the princess narrative and her identity, but because underneath it lies the trap of rampant consumerism. The great news, however, is that we can’t afford to join that culture anyway, which also comes with its own parenting challenges, but will  make so many other things easier.

Orenstein does a great job of showing that “princess culture” is such a recent phenomenon, and that signing up is just to play into corporate hands (and to get those hands into your pockets). That these companies are not simply giving consumers what they want, but are also intentionally coercing children into wanting consumer products that are expensive, and detrimental to the development of their self-image. She shows that companies are out to make a buck by gendering children’s toys (thereby ensuring that parents will have to buy two of everything), and also by inventing stages from toddler to tween to “pre-tween” so that nothing ever lasts more than a season.

Orenstein’s writing is funny, engaging, and self-deprecating as she draws on her own experiences as a mother negotiating the labyrinth of princess-dom. She doesn’t take cheap shots, most notably in her chapter on the child beauty pageant circuits. Many of her subjects are really easy targets, but Orenstein writes about them with sympathy, and also shows how their preposterousness is only a magnified version of most parents’ experiences with princess consumer culture, echoing those same old excuses: “But we’re only giving her what she wants” and “It’s doing no harm.” From reading this book, it becomes decidedly clear that neither of these statements are true.

Anyway, what’s strangest to me is that the choir Orenstein is preaching to isn’t all that big. I guess if it was, we’d all have nothing much to sing about. For me, one of the biggest surprises of parenthood all along has been that common sense is such a relative thing. It reminds me of when writer Carrie Snyder wrote about no-gift birthday parties in her parenting column (an idea we’ve since stolen), and got the most cruel (anonymous) responses, similar to those received by Orenstein herself when, as she writes, she first dared to suggest that princess-dom might not be doing our daughters a lot of good. Both mothers were accused of deprivation, which is not so unbelievable, I guess, when you consider that so many people think shoe shopping is exercising our democratic freedom (not to mention, how to be a feminist). Anyway, I guess what I mean is that these are the people who should be reading this book, but they won’t be, and that’s depressing.

September 19, 2011

I'll be there when Rebecca Rosenblum launches The Big Dream tomorrow. Will you?

Tomorrow night, Rebecca Rosenblum launches The Big Dream at the Dora Keogh Pub on the Danforth. Rebecca has been my friend since I met her in Goldberry Long’s backyard in September 2005, though at that time I knew her as “the girl who worked at Harlequin” (this was before I discovered that everybody, in fact, has worked at Harlequin). Other important things about Rebecca are that one day I realized that “Becky” was written on her shoe, which is how I discovered that everybody calls her Becky, except for everybody she met after 2005 (perhaps she wasn’t wearing those shoes often enough?), and also that both of us had the same photocopied picture of Bob Geldof on our bedroom walls during high school.

Three years ago, when her first book came out, Rebecca was the subject of one of my first interviews, which makes it all the more poignant that I’ll be interviewing her as part of her launch tomorrow, all up in front of the crowd and everything. I’m honoured to be a part of the event, so excited to celebrate this wonderful book with her, and also, I’ve made cupcakes. We’ve even got a babysitter! This is a big deal.

If you can’t make it, do c heck out the book. Yesterday morning, Margaret Atwood tweeted that she was looking forward to it, and as someone who just finished reading it, I can promise that Margaret Atwood will not be disappointed. Neither will you.

September 18, 2011

Eden Mills 2011

Last year, our Eden Mills Writers Festival experience was diminished by the efforts we spent on trying to get Harriet to fall asleep to no avail. Today we accepted that there would be no sleep (highly controversial), and had a marvelous time. The weather was glorious. We also particularly like Eden Mills because it functions in accordance with our family philosophy of not leaving the house early in the morning, and so there were pancakes, and pajama lazing. Then we hit the road, and the traffic was easy. The leaves were not as autumnal as in year’s past, but I was also wearing capris and sandals, and that was nice. We rolled in Eden Mills around 12:30, and so the day of literary festivalling began.

It was my fourth Eden Mills, by the way, and Stuart’s and Harriet’s third. The first readings I wanted to see were the poets, but they were indoors in the Chapel, so Harriet and Stuart stayed outdoors with Harriet’s outdoor voice. And I heard Priscilla Uppall and Lorna Crozier, who were so, so wonderful. In exchange for missing the reading, H&S split a cupcake, so everyone was happy. Then we went to the children’s readings, where we heard Andrea Wayne von Königslöw, and Kari-Lynn Winters. I skipped out partway through Winters, however, so that I could hear my friend Julia read at the Fringe Stage, and she had her audience utterly engaged. It was a pleasure to see her there.

After that, I met back up with my family, and we went to hear Claire Tacon and Alison Pick. Then to the Organic Ice Cream sellers, who delighted everyone involved. We stopped on Publisher’s Way to do a bit of shopping, and to meet with our Biblioasis and TNQ friends. (It was a friend-filled day. Today Eden Mills was populated by some of our favourite people.) Must admit, was a little disappointed to see other indie presses missing, in particular Brick Books because I’d been looking forward to buying Stephanie Bolster’s new book. Alas, my heart was delighted by the new addition of Demeter Press, however, and the chance to meet the fine people there (whose work I’ve been a champion of in the past). We ended up buying Claire Tacon’s In the Field, Amanda Jernigan’s Groundwork, Rocking the Cradle by Andrea O’Reilly, and Andrea Wayne von Königslöw’s How Do You Read to a Rabbit?

We went to see the magician next, who was awesome (though Harriet went into a frenzy when he started making balloon animals, screaming, “I want monkey right now!” and we had to talk her down, because there weren’t enough to go around). And I wanted to stay for the last session to hear Johanna Skibsrud read from her new book, but Harriet was fading and we’re smart enough now to no longer push our luck. She’d been so good all day, and so Eden Mills was over while the going was still good. (I did get to sit across the aisle from Skibsrud at the poetry readings though, which was kind of cool).

Last night I’d googled “Places to Eat Near Eden Mills”, and discovered a small town called Rockwood about ten minutes away. We drove there, hoping something would be open, and stumbled upon The Heaven on 7 Bistro and Pub, which was so delicious, the perfect end to a perfect day. Harriet was on her way out and spent most of the meal under the table, but we delighted in our dinners, and Harriet came up to partake in cheesecake. Then home again, home again, and Harriet agreed not to tantrum as long as we listened to Elizabeth Mitchell’s “Freight Train” on repeat, so there was a lot of that. Fortunately, traffic was kind to us again. Then home.