May 18, 2010
Literary Gala Raising Funds for Motherhood Research and Activism
With readings by Miriam Toews, Di Brandt, Margaret Christakos, Afua Cooper, Rishma Dunlop, Diane Flacks, Susan Glickman, Marni Jackson, M. Nourbese Philip, Althea Prince, Jane Satterfield, and Priscila Uppal
In support of the newly established Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI).
Friday, May 21, 2010
7 pm to 10:30 pm
Oakham House
Ryerson University
63 Gould Street
Toronto, Ontario
When Andrea O’Reilly founded The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), the world’s first feminist research association for the study of motherhood, she was amazed by the enthusiastic response she got. “We started in 1998 at York University, and over the years our association grew to have more than 500 members from two dozen countries, and ARM’s work included an academic journal and press,” says Dr. O’Reilly. “ARM recently moved out of the university and has been reborn as Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), an independent non-profit organization. Its focus remains feminist scholarship, activism, and community involvement concerning the issues of mothering and motherhood.”
Tickets are $65 per person and available at the website, or at the door.
May 17, 2010
Dispatches from another dimension
“Without question Tess was getting bigger and more complicated every day. But she was also growing her story. Growing a life that acquires its own description. Babies have only a handful of verbs. They eat, shit, cry, spit up, sleep, smile and wiggle. As a new parent, you live inside those few verbs with your child for the first year. In a sense, that’s part of the disorientation on top of sleep deprivation and all the other usual suspects. Some mornings I’d catch myself sitting with Tess and shaking the rattle, as I had the day before, and the day before that, or listening to her cry, or to her feed, and wonder where the hell all my verbs had gone. Could somebody open a window in there?
This might ultimately explain why parents are so punishing with their anecdotes. We are ecstatic, as if thawed from a long cryogenic sleep, with each rejuvenating action taken by our kids, no matter how banal. Like tourists with too many holiday slides, we prattle on to bored strangers, celebrating our return from new frontiers. ‘My god,” we say, ‘you should have seen the baby and the thing he did with the garden hose the other day! And this morning he made a brand new sound, sort of like he said, ‘multifaceted’ but, thing is, we don’t even use that word around the house, do we hon?’ Parents– all of us– send dispatches from another dimension where babies watching dogs, or futzing with garden hoses, is something blockbuster. And it is. Like, wow.
Or maybe you just had to be there.”
–from C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark by Ryan Knighton (and my review is here).
May 16, 2010
What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy
I’ve been devouring short story collections lately, one story after another without even a pause for breath in between. And then I read “What Becomes”, the first story in A.L. Kennedy’s new short story collection of the same name, and I had to put the book down for a while. The story, about a man who’s the only person in the audience at a small movie theatre, who’s been waiting for the film to start and then when it starts, it has no sound– the story was so brutally, heartbreakingly sad that I just needed a rest before I could handle another. Which was good intuition on my part, because the stories in Kennedy’s collection are unrelentingly bleak.
And yet, would it surprise you that the collection was also hysterically funny? In particular, the passage about gerbil installation: “You’ve had some right cowboys in here… Any chance of a cuppa once I’m done?” Kennedy’s characters are usually profoundly lonely, with a wry outlook, sharp intelligence and sense of humour that makes the loneliness even more tragic, because it’s clear how much they’re aware of their disconnect, that they’d probably make for fairly good company. So tragic yes, but still funny. Bleak plus hilarious does make for a vision that is quite singular.
In the title story, the man in the movie theatre has left a troubled marriage in which so much has gone unsaid, in which the right things have never been offered at quite the right time. “Edinburgh” is the story of a man who owns an organic fruit and veg shop (“Sell organic food and imitation bacon, and suddenly folk thought you’d tolerate anything.”). He falls for a customer, and their love story is a trick of tenses– perhaps a used-to-be, a could-have-been, a never-to-have-been, or the still purely hypothetical. Regardless, it doesn’t end happy. “Saturday Teatime” the story of a woman’s failed attempts to clear her mind in a flotation tank (which is more like a “Flotation Damp-Cupboard”). “Confectioner’s Gold” the story of a couple who’ve lost everything in the recent economic collapse. “Whole Family With Young Children Devastated” is about a character who peers too much into the heartbreak of others, when she can barely help herself. In “As God Made Us”, a group of young with various physical impairments are asked to leave a swimming pool because they’re upsetting nearby children. “Sympathy” is a graphic one-night-stand in a hotel room, delivered solely with dialogue.
There is not a story among these that doesn’t pack a solid punch. Kennedy’s atmosphere is so vivid, her characters’ interior voices so deeply authentic, and though her prose doesn’t call attention itself, it is as perfect as the voices are. Her stories are constructed of details, right down to the grouting between the tiles on the floor, and the things her characters know, trivia netted or wisdom earned– the characters become people by this. Kennedy’s first-person narrators are so convincing that they must be the voice of the author herself, and yet the voices are impossibly various, so of course they’re not. And this is truly the mark of a stunning fiction writer, that what’s imagined is made so vividly real.
May 16, 2010
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
To write about Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal in 350 words was one of the most demanding and complex writerly tasks I have ever undertaken, and my review of the novel appears on the April 2010 of Quill & Quire (available here online). The first novel by the precocious Catton, The Rehearsal is difficult, devourable, innovative, frustrating, and fascinating. I didn’t love it, but I don’t think it even wanted me to, and it’s a stunning novel in particular for being written in an time in which so many stories are the same. Truly, this is something different. And though the parallels are by no means straightforward, and I don’t think liking one is a recommendation for the other, The Rehearsal is more like The Westing Game than any other novel I’ve read as an adult. Trying to get it all straight, however– especially in 350 words– was completely exhausting, and my mind is shutting down now just considering it again.
So I’ll let others try. Stephany Aulenback recommends it at Crooked House. The Rehearsal is the May Book Club selection at Eye Weekly. And a rave review in The Toronto Star.
May 14, 2010
On BookCamp Toronto
I’m looking forward to being part of the Canada Reads session tomorrow at BookCamp Toronto at 2:00. Hope to see (and hear from!) some of you there to talk about the success of CBC’s Canada Reads program and the exciting possibilities for its future.
May 14, 2010
Rebecca Rosenblum's wonderful new website
My friend Rebecca Rosenblum has a wonderful new website, (which my husband made for her!). You should take a trip over and welcome Rebecca to her new home. Congratulations to Rebecca and Stuart!
May 13, 2010
C'mon Papa by Ryan Knighton
There is no better metaphor than blindness to describe new parenthood. Nobody knows what they’re getting into, nobody ever really sees the baby properly in the ultrasound, nobody expects what will happen when the baby arrives. Even those of us blessed with good vision have had trouble recognizing our newborns once they’re out in the world. And, um, even those of us with good vision have stuffed soothers into eye sockets and smashed fragile skulls into door frames. Parenthood is the kind of thing you have to pick up on the job, and there’s plenty of stumbling along the way.
All this is to underline the universality of Ryan Knighton’s experience as outlined in his memoir C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark. But of course to consider blindness as a metaphor is only part of the story. Knighton has been losing his vision since being diagnosed with a dengerative eye condition at 18, and he is now blind. What vision he has left has enabled him to see his daughter only in glimpses, as a blur. His story of fatherhood and blindness considers little details the rest of us take for granted– venturing out with the baby carrier when you can’t see where you’re going (though he should know that many of us have also walked around with our children facing out and covered in puke, and not realized it), how to find a silent toddler who has toddled away, how to change a diaper when you’re guided by touch, how to move around in the dark so the light doesn’t wake the baby (and it is perhaps here only that Knighton would have an advantage).
Knighton writes about life with a newborn better than any other parent-memoirist I’ve encountered. (The horror! The horror! Fear of colic! Fact of gas!) This might be because he’s the first father parent-memoirist I’ve ever encountered– I think most mothers get too lost in the murky swim of things to remember it all as pointedly as Knighton does, and even if they do, those memories fall victim to amnesia. What he gets really well, however, is how sound factors into early parenthood: the incessant newborn cries, the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car with a shrieking infant, that eerie silence once the baby is asleep and all ears are tuned listening to… nothing. Or was that a rustle? And oh shit, the baby’s up again. You go.
And did you know that baby monitors were invented out of the paranoia of the Lindbergh baby case? Um, and that if your baby woke up you’d probably hear it anyway, even without an electronic device?
Knighton’s book has a bit of the “There are the notes./ Now where is the money?” about it, which is refreshingly honest and illuminating. He describes the pressure to write, to produce, in order to support his family, which is probably common of most fathers and not something mothers would experience to the same extent. Because “Provider” is the one role that is defined for a father, the one job for which he’s not just a bystander. Knighton’s helplessness in supporting his wife in other tasks would not be limited just to a blind man– during pregnancy, labour and the newborn days, fathers are very much outside of the experience no matter how much they’re supportive, and Knighton does a fine job of describing what that helplessness feels like. So he does what he can do– he writes and writes.
Ryan Knighton belongs to that generation that believes it invented parenting (though it kind of did, grammatically speaking. was “parent” even a verb before that?) but as a father and as a blind man, he has a unique perspective to add to the mommy/daddy canon. His book is hilarious and beautiful, and a testament to love and to family.
May 12, 2010
So what is to be done with phone boxes
From “The Person in the Phone Booth” by David Trotter. London Review of Books 32.2:
“So what is to be done with phone boxes? Or, increasingly, without them? Some will no doubt survive, merged imperceptibly into the general fuzz of urban information. Others may enjoy an afterlife as tourist attraction, temporary internet office or excuse for performance art. The rest will vanish. But the question these cubicles have posed for more than a century is as pertinent now as it ever was. How are we to go on being private in public? The lesson to be learned from the history of the phone box is that the construction of privacy in public by physical rather than social and cultural means always tends to excess. The physical structure (box, booth or kiosk) brought about experiences which, although they did not concern telecommunication, became indelibly associated with it. The lesson to be learned from the representation of the phone box in folk memory, and in literature and film, is that we remember the piss and the phlegm, and the hauntedness. There is knowledge in that remembering, knowledge we wouldn’t otherwise have, of what ordinary coexistence in dense populations might actually amount to. We’ll miss out on a lot of inadvertency, both good and bad, if we give up constructing privacy in public by physical means. We may find ourselves in a world in which the boundary between public and private is either non-existent or policed by surveillance and legal constraint. That doesn’t sound to me like much of an improvement on those anxious, savoury minutes spent locked and lit up in the toxic aquarium.”
May 12, 2010
Books in Motion #5
Spotted westbound on the Bloor-Danforth line (as I was on my way to the first meeting of my brand new book club, The Vicious Circle [which is setting up to be the best book club ever]), a white male approximately forty years old. Hairline slightly receding, drinking a can of Pepsi, wearing a thick gold wedding band. His handsome-enough appearance juxtaposed with flood pants, black socks, bad running shoes and a windbreaker. He was reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest, on-loan from the Toronto Public Library.
May 10, 2010
Spam in the post!
Today was amazing because I received spam in the post! A letter from Patricia Besupa Zatal, manager of a South African prime bank. She wants me to handle some kind of complicated financial transaction and feels comfortable dealing with me having already gone through my impressive profile by my country’s Chamber of Commerce. So exciting. They’re even going to give me a cut. So basically, I’m thinking about retirement.
It’s all very 1992– has Patricia never heard of the internet? What they had to have spent on stamps boggles the mind, and I can’t help worrying they might not make it back. I will also keep the stamp– South African stamps mailed my con-artists don’t arrive every day. And I’ve hung the letter on the fridge. I’m very honoured to be a part of this project and excited to see what happens going forward.
