January 30, 2011

Found Clock

Behold, the clock we found on the curb today and it’s new home on my kitchen wall of interesting and colourful things. Beside, in particular, the souvenir tray from mid-‘sixties Toronto (skyline sans CN tower!) that we found on another curb about six years ago. Below that is a series of photos I took in a British supermarket cereal aisle. Mustn’t neglect the Blackpool tea towel either, or the bunting, the watering can and bucket mobile (which was the only thing of interest I could find at the worst bookshop ever), and you even get a glimpse of my gorgeous Tessa Kiros cookbooks on the right. Anyway, I like the clock. We didn’t have an analog clock before (and yes, they’re really called that. Which I find a bit strange) and I was concerned that Harriet would grow up to be analog clock illiterate. No more. I foresee many conversations about big hands and little hands ahead of us over cereal bowls and teacups.

January 27, 2011

Family Literacy Day!

Today is Family Literacy Day, sponsored by ABC Life Literacy Canada. Which, last year, we turned into a week-long celebration with author interviews, book recommendations, reading tips, a field trip and even a party/baby literary salon!! This year, we were a bit less ambitious and celebrated family literacy the way we do every day, by reading eleventeen storybooks over and over again, but this day is definitely worthy of a trip back through last year’s fun. And while we’re on the subject of family literacy, why don’t you check out the new entry up at the Literature for Life blog?

January 27, 2011

Wild Libraries I have known: Spadina Road (TPL)

I once wrote a love letter to the Spadina Road Library, when I was coming out of the throes of the post-partum life and incredibly grateful for how the library and its staff had supported me through that period. Eighteen months later, I think I can address the subject with the benefit of perspective, and I say this: If not for the Spadina Road Library, I would be dead, or something very close to it.

Self-serve checkout machines are being installed at libraries across the city, and it makes me sad when I remember the days when the Spadina Road libarians were the only human beings I spoke to. And I pity the poor library patron in the throes of her own personal something who has to make do with a device that scans and beeps, instead of the lovely men and women who recognized me, asked me how my day was going, told me that my acne-covered pickled pig of a newborn was adorable. The library became my destination in an otherwise aimless life, and it meant everything to me.

These days, my local library branch has become a portal to the world, the hub of my community. And living in a city of millions, community is so very precious, so hubs like this are terribly necessary (and take note, Toronto City Council. Every penny you spend on your library system builds a better city). When I go to the library, I run into friends from the neighbourhood, I meet the new friends we’ve made through the library’s children’s programming, I pick up the books I’ve reserved through TPL’s inter-library system which are delivered like a miracle to a patron’s local branch. I meet the librarian who I continue to credit with teaching me to engage with my newborn through songs and games, which can’t help but be the reason for how well we’re doing today. We may see Cindy working at the reference desk, who is only the fourth person in the entire universe that Harriet refers to by name (after Mommy, Daddy and Elmo). We check out CDs and DVDs, and browse the stacks for picture books, and cookbooks, and guidebooks for our upcoming trip to the UK.

The Spadina Road library has become a second home, and we’re not the only ones, because our little branch is always busy with school groups visiting, patrons using the internet, people studying, kids playing, people seeking information all of kinds, and also, yes, a few desperate people (like I once was) seeking a touchstone, the sound of a human voice, and never failing to find one.

January 25, 2011

It was striped

“‘Have you seen my umbrella?’ a hyper Jamaican woman demands.
‘No.”
‘I left it right here.’ She points where I’m sitting.
‘I didn’t see it,’ I say.
‘I left it right here. Did you see it?’ The cuffs of her jacket are frayed, buttons are missing. I look behind and under my chair, go back to Emily.

The earth reversed her Hemispheres–
I touched the Universe–
And back it slid– and I alone–
A Speck upon a Ball–
Went out upon Circumference–

‘Have you seen my umbrella?’ the Jamaican woman demands of another bottom-feeder. ‘I left it right here.’ She points at me again, and I know she thinks I’ve swiped it. ‘It was striped.’
‘I can’t see it anywhere,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘I left it right here. Striped.’

— from Lemon by Cordelia Strube

January 24, 2011

On Literary Blogs: A Passion for Reading

One of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me was being asked to speak about literary blogs on a panel for an “Arts Matters” forum, hosted by Their Excellencies, Governor General Michaëlle Jean and Jean-Daniel Lafond in December 2008. I traveled to Ottawa by train, arriving in an incredible snowstorm, and in spite of the weather, a good crowd turned out to the forum at the Ottawa Public Library. My adoration for my fell0w panelists was solidified on the trip back to Rideau Hall, and the group of us spent the next day and a half as the Governor General’s guests there, attending the Governor General’s Literary Awards the following evening. It was a magical experience, unreal to fathom now. Even more so now that we have a new Governor General and the old website has come down, my address on literary blogs along with it.

So I’ve reposted it on my own site, for posterity. You can read it here.

January 20, 2011

The kids books we've been enjoying lately

“There’s no doubt that the young adult novel is Fitch’s true metier”, writes Deirdre Baker in her Toronto Star review of Sheree Fitch’s latest book Pluto’s Ghost, and I have no truck with that, because in our house Fitch is queen of the board book (we discovered her via Kisses Kisses Baby-O), but her picture books own our hearts as well. In particular Mabel Murple, which is the reason  my daughter knows at least one colour. First published in 1995 and recently re-issued with vibrant new illustrations, Mabel Murple is the tongue-twisting story of a purple girl, all dreamed up. A skateboarding scallywag, skiing speed demon (on purple snow) with a purple teddy bear called Snickernickerbox (and he snores). A story of merry motorbiking through muddy purple puddles, and a delectable-sounded condiment called Mabel Murple’s purple maple syrple. A whimsical singsong, adored by everybody in our family.

I recently checked out Mem Fox’s website, and found out that she’d been to dinner at Judith Viorst’s not too long ago, and the idea of such a dinner party makes me a bit in love with the whole wide world. I’ve been getting a similar feeling from Viorst’s book Sunday Morning for ages now, with its amazing silhouette drawings by Hilary Knight. The drawings are what Harriet likes best about the book, and how she can pick out the cat and owl, and see all the rooms in the house at once with the fourth wall removed. She doesn’t get the jokes and the mischief yet though, which are my favourite parts. The boy who wakes up his brother with the noise like a soft machine gun, and how he walks around the house saying, “God, I’m hungry. God, I’m hungry,” because there are no grown-ups around to tell him not to say god. The fights with his brother, which are settled with a karate chop, and how they use their mother’s dress from the hamper to sop up spilled milk.

The Owl and the Pussycat with Stephane Jorisch’s illustrations is deeply weird, and weirdly imagined. Tough cat arrives from the wrong side of the tracks, and masses look on with stone faces, mostly because they’re all wearing masks. The owl and the pussy cat are oblivious to the spectacle they are, and decide to be married for too long they have tarried. Sailing away to the land where the bong trees grow, they finally find a place where a pairing such as theirs is accepted, and they end up dancing by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon. These illustrations are just subtly sinister enough that a child will never stop being fascinated by them, but they’ll also never be entirely sure why they are.

Finally, we love, love Elephant and Piggie. So does everybody, of course, but better late to the party than never. The latest in the series We Are in a Book (which I discovered via Nathalie Foy) does not disappoint. Gerald is thrilled to discover that he and Piggie are actually in a book (“That is so cool!”) until he learns that the book will end. That all books end. So together, he and Piggie come up with a plan to prolong their metafictional existences. It’s wonderful, and Harriet finds the simple language and exaggerated gestured in the illustrations absolutely hilarious. Stuart and I have about as much fun reading this to her as she has listening to us.

January 19, 2011

Canada Reads Indies 2: Be Good by Stacey May Fowles

I’ve developed an aversion for any book described as “gritty”, mainly because “gritty” has lately been synonymous with “badly written stories about troubled girls who exchange blow jobs for heroin”. As though addressing sex, drugs and self-harming is merit enough that the writing itself doesn’t have to be good, the book doesn’t have to be interesting. This whole approach also failing to address the reason why so many fictional girls are exchanging blow jobs for heroin, because, frankly, this is troubling, but I digress.

So I was relieved to find that Stacey May Fowles’ first novel Be Good had more going for it than sheer grittiness. The book is about two friends who struggle with their feelings for one another, and end up on opposite sides of the country in unsatisfying relationships. Hannah has just left Montreal to follow her boyfriend Finn to Vancouver, while Morgan has been traveling Europe on the dime of her older lover Mr. Templeton. The novel comprises a series of flashbacks and snapshots which culminate to the story from a variety of perspectives– Hannah’s, Morgan’s, her roommate Estella’s, Finn’s and Mr. Templeton’s, as well as that of disembodied narrative voice that seems to be curating the collection.

The propensity towards falsehood and self-delusion (the latter never as effective as the former) on the part of Hannah and Morgan, as well as the fragmented nature of the narrative, ensures that “what really happened” is never clear, nor does it need to be, and that it’s what characters think happened which is more important (and always fluid). Ambiguity, embellishment, storytelling and outright lies are narrative methods as valid as truth, and perhaps even more valid for their unwillingness to adhere to the limits that truth imposes.

Hannah and Morgan are trying on various to guises to discover what’s at their core, chasing after different fantasies of the kind of women they might actually be. They pose drinking on fire escapes, imagining the world throwing them admiring glances, enacting magazine shoots, an impression of unreality. They dress up in costumes, imagine that the self is composed of details like grape bubblicious, see themselves from the outside and work that image down to the smallest detail. They see their friends as accessories, every new scene a set-up, that the world can be so deftly manipulated, that the people are so plastic.

Be Good is a coming of age story, the turning point occurring with Hannah’s line, “Perhaps the issue is not what people see in me but rather what I see in them.” Which is a revelation from a woman of any age, really. To step out of gaze and take stock of where you are. Though of course the conclusion is not so simple– it’s never clear whether each of the separate perspectives are actually different narrators, as there is a sameness to the voices. And though Hannah is the wordsmith of the two, Morgan is a famous fabricator, and so it’s possible that the whole book was hatched in the head of either of them, imagining the self as seen through the eyes of others. This last point being what makes Fowles’ book more interesting than other grit-lit– with all that ambiguity, this story is solipsistic with a twist.

Which is in constrast with Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, whose narrator is entirely self-effacing, but the two books share much else in common. Both are coming of age stories in with the protagonist’s relationship to the story isn’t always clear, in which he or she knows more or less than he/she lets on. Both books play with ideas of superficial poses, the natives playing up their culture on Indian Days not so far removed from the girls on the fire escape. Both books also have an ambiguous relationship to truth and fact, and choose to overlook these items in favour of a good story. Truth and Bright Water is also quite gritty, also with lesbians, suicide, sex, drink, drugs and destruction, and both skim a facile narrative surface belying darker stories underneath.

It’s just that in King’s book, however, we know that the darker stories are certainly true, and no longer are these poses anymore. His story wedded to a long, long history, whereas Fowles’ book and their characters seem to exist outside of time. King’s subtext more substantial too, unsurprisingly as insubstantiality is Fowles’ preoccupation here, but if we’re comparing books (which we are), King’s comes out the richer. If we weren’t comparing books, however, these two would stand side-by-side, drawing fascinating connections from one another.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:

1) Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King

2) Be Good by Stacey May Fowles

January 18, 2011

This is Harriet, who

This is Harriet, who can say tutu. Today she said sun for the first time, as well as soap and snow. And while we were reading Madeline, she pooh-poohed to the tiger in the zoo on cue. When she reads Madeline, she goes and gets her Madeline doll, and then goes and puts the doll away when the story is finished. When she sings I’m a Little Teapot, she goes and gets her teapot. When we’re at toddler time at the library and sing Twinkle Twinkle, Harriet goes over and points to the star on the door. Similiar with the clock on the wall during Hickory Dickory. She says boom whenever anything falls on the floor, which is often, but she pronounces it bum. She demands that our radio be playing music at all times, and gets frustated when I won’t turn off CBC, so then I have to. She is totally into Skinnamarink, and alligators, and Dennis Lee’s poem Alligator Pie. Her interests include being flung through the air, and looking out the window. Last week, she learned to kiss properly (as opposed to slapping her mouth against my face and saying “mmmbah”) and I don’t know that I’ve ever loved anything as much as that tiny smack. She loves reading books as much as she loves throwing them on the floor, and she’ll sit reading stories for ages, so she’s the toddler of my dreams. She likes Olivia, and Shirley Hughes’ Alfie, and any book about babies, and Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie, which she laughs at as she leafs through it by herself. She loves If You’re Happy and You Know It because she likes any excuse to clap her hands. She puts her arms in the air and says, “Uppy” and there is no choice but to comply. Every day she has more hair, and her big brown beautiful eyes are unfathomably lovely. We really love her. Every night around 11:30, we mention her for the first time in three hours, and it’s obvious that we miss her. Conversations about what Harriet likes, and how Harriet is, because it’s Harriet, you know. But not that we miss her so much of course that we’d want to hear a peep out of her before morning, oh no. There’s what Harriet likes and how Harriet is, but we’re very content to meet her again with the sun.

January 18, 2011

The Torontonians by Phyllis Brett Young (and Betty Draper)

Phyllis Brett Young’s 1960book The Torontonians is not necessarily to be read as a stunning example of the novel form. The satire and irony have been rendered most unsubtle in the years since its first publication, so that The Torontonians reads more like Cyra McFadden’s The Serial than a remarkable work of literature. Remarkable, however, The Torontonians most certainly is when it is read for its feminist content and Toronto setting. It’s a fun read too, and in places very funny.

Published three years before Betty Friedan’s book, The Torontonians is The Feminine Mystique put to fiction, except that Young makes clear what most modern readers of The Feminine Mystique miss: the new woman problem is not so much with the domestic sphere itself, but rather with what consumerism has done to it. Women have never had it so good, except that their labour has been alienated from production via labour saving devices, which don’t actually save labour but just create more jobs to do. And then they’re expected to be fulfilled by the material goods that decorate their houses, and adorn their yards, and when they fail to be, nobody can imagine what could possibly have gone wrong. In its critique of consumer society, Young’s novel anticipates Atwood’s The Edible Woman.

The Torontonians also employs that setting so familiar from Atwood: the city of Toronto. London’s creeping here too, as Karen Whitney’s home on the city’s outskirts overnight becomes the centre of suburban Rowanwood (which was modelled on Leaside). One of the most enduring images of the novel is the Whitney’s buckweed lawn, which they’re forced to spend a summer painstakingly installing because they can’t afford to lay down sod but also realize their neighbours are running out of patience with their uncultivated grass. Rowanwood is the kind of neighbourhood in which a house with just one bathroom is frowned upon for dragging down the market value of the others.

In her novel, Young paints a picture of Toronto in the midst of transition, juxtaposing the suburbs against downtown where Karen had grown up in the Annex neighbourhood. She writes of a Toronto elite (“the Masseys and the masses”) who were all familiar through family connections, and attended the same private schools. But the city, howeer constant in its hum, is always changing. With some of her scenes set against pre-CN Tower aerial views, she shows that no one ever steps into the same city twice.

Young’s novel is a historical document, and deliberately so, as as the book’s introduction makes clear. She thought it was important that writers document the way people lived then, and so we get a story in which doctor and patient both smoke during an examination at the Medical Arts Building at Bloor and St. George. We read about a city in which the subway was new, New Canadians were usually Hungarian, downtown high rise apartments were novel (and an exotic dream for the bored housewives of Rowanwood). There is the Peyton Place-ish suburban sex too, and a very funny line about who’d do what in Loblaws, but Young shows restraint here. By the end of the book it is quite clear that her people are not caricatures, and the narrative rises above plot cliches.

(The Torontonians is also very, very Betty Draper, and is the first Mad Men-ish book of a few I will be reading in the next while. The others are The Collected Works of John Cheever, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything. Any other suggestions?)

January 16, 2011

Upcoming Pivot

It’s not easy to convince me to leave the house (because I love my house. It’s warm, it has my husband and my slanket), but the all-star line-up for the upcoming Pivot at the Press Club is calling my name. Not only does it feature Zoe Whittall, who was our interview subject not long ago, and Catherine Graham, who is a lovely person of my acquaintance whose new book will soon be mine, but the trio is topped off by Larissa Andrusyshyn whose Mammoth was one of my favourite books of 2010. Plus, there will be beer there. I absolutely cannot wait.