March 5, 2010
Can-Reads Indies #5: Moody Food by Ray Robertson
Until yesterday afternoon, I was dreading having to write this review. I was about half way into Moody Food and I just wasn’t getting it. I did like the references to 1960s’ Toronto and the Yorkville I only know from ancient mythology; I liked Thomas’s back-story; I liked the Making Waves Bookshop; I loved certain ways Thomas’s understanding of music was described (in particular, what he heard in the vaccuum cleaner when he was a child). But I found the prose awkward, with strangely-claused sentences that were hard to follow. And my biggest problem was with Bill Hansen.
For the first half of the book, Bill was a cipher. He was a non-character, and I couldn’t figure out why any of the others, with their vivid personalities– his cool girlfriend, Christine, his old hippie boss at the bookstore, the enigmatic Thomas Graham himself– why were they even hanging out with him? Bill took responsibility for nothing, had no real talents of his own (so they made him the drummer), didn’t follow through with anything, all of this for no real reason except to propel the plot. Let’s face it– in reality, Christine would never have dated him, Kelorn would never have hired him (and would have fired him once he stopped showing up for work), and Thomas wouldn’t ever have given him the time of day. Moody Food would never have happened. It all seemed like a construct, and that bothered me.
Thomas Graham himself I also had a hard time with– I didn’t buy his charisma. Though I started to see that the problem here was that we were seeing him through Bill’s eyes, and Bill describes himself as “the first and last disciple of Thomas Graham”, plus Bill was doing a lot of drugs, so probably nobody else really bought the charisma either.
So this disparate group comes together to form The Duckhead Secret Society, hooks themselves up with a steel guitar player called Slippery Bannister, they eventually catch the interest of a record producer with their “interstellar North American music”, and the rest is music history. Music history in the “Almost Famous” sense, the Behind the Music downward spiral that by now is a familiar narrative. And for me, once the spiral started, I finally found the book’s momentum.
Thomas and Bill get into cocaine, and then Thomas starts doing heroin, and instead of focusing on their tour and the album they were contracted to make, Thomas becomes absorbed by his magnum opus “Moody Food”. At one point, he’s got a cow in the studio, and he’s got a certain affinity for bovines anyway since becoming obsessed with vegetarianism. Robertson is throwing out these amazing sentences like, “When he hit the desert earth the crunch of his carrot was the only sound for miles.” Thomas is falling apart on stage, but he doesn’t care, and he and Bill spend their nights strung out on coke and writing new material (for which Bill is essential, because he hears music in colours and matches it with passages from library books they steal from all over North America). And Thomas starts referring to himself in the third person, and throwing liver off balconies, and uttering lines like, “The heart gets all the songs written about it and it’s what everybody talks about, but the liver is the biggest thing in you. So how come you never hear anybody talking about the liver? Where are all the songs written about it?”
When Thomas slips too far over the edge, suddenly Bill Hansen makes sense. We’re not supposed to like the guy, much like how we felt about Max from How Happy to Be. Unlike Max, however, Bill lacks wit and charm, and his perspective is remarkably limited: later, a character says to him, “I knew you weren’t bright, but I never took you for stupid.” But he is, a little bit, because he’s just a kid from Etobicoke who’s caught up in a story that’s too much for him. When the Duckhead Secret Society returns from their tour, Thomas holes up in his hotel room until the RCMP catch on (because he’s dodging the draft, and wanted for drug possession). The whole Yorkville scene has gotten out of control, and as a riot breaks out between protesters and police, Thomas Graham urges his band up on the rooftops for one last show that would have been an overwhelming cliche, but hilariously and tragically isn’t, and all of the sudden our perspective (and Bill’s) is whipped back to something resembling reality. How we’ve been following him so up close all this time, but Thomas Graham from far away can actually blend into a crowd.
I really enjoyed this book in the end, and I’m not sure if my early reservations were my fault or the book’s, but I didn’t have any by the time I was finished. That it took me so long to get into it, however (and this is a 400 page book), would have me counting against it. And here’s where this ranking think is stupid– every single book I’ve read as part of Canada Reads: Independently would probably be the very best book on most reading lists, but this is a particularly superlative reading list. Which means that although Moody Food is taking the bottom spot, it’s only because of its very good company, and also that my heart is breaking. But that this entire book list has been a really incredible reading experience and I’m so pleased to have had it.
Canada Reads: Independently Rankings:
3) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad
4) Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso
5) Moody Food by Ray Robertson
March 4, 2010
franny and zooey by colleen heslin
franny and zooey by colleen heslin, as seen in issue 32.3 of Room Magazine. Image used here with permission of the artist. Because I love it.
March 4, 2010
Why I love the Toronto Public Library/ How the internet gets books read
I am an avid buyer, mostly because I can’t quit, but also because any person who loves books really should be. If I bought every book I wanted, however, I’d have to move to a warehouse and I’d be totally broke, so I am pleased to have the best public library system in the world at my disposal so I can eat its book-buying dust. In a good way.
Waiting for me at the library today was The Sixties by Jenny Diski (of the LRB blog, and many elsewheres), When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (which I read about on the The Guardian Books Blog), and Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Matsuki Mockett (because Maud Newton said so).
March 3, 2010
The Association for Research on Mothering, and Me
UPDATE: Ann Douglas speaks with ARM’s Founder and Director Andrea O’Reilly.
I am only one of many people upset at the news that the Association for Research on Mothering at York University is set to close at the end of next month. (This is particularly devastating, coming on the back of more bad news for the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which played such a big role in my discovery of feminism via the magazines I bought there that I’d never seen anywhere else, ever). Though I’ve only been a mother for nine months, and my relationship with ARM has been peripheral, I can honestly say the two books I’ve read from their Demeter Press (which is also to close) have done more to enhance my understanding of my new life than anything else.
Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts is the very best book on motherhood I’ve ever read. I’ve been a smarter, more confident, more open-minded and better parent since encountering it in November, and have been much better equipped to deal with the onslaught of other resources constantly undermining my authority. Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog has played a fundamental role in helping me to address my ambivalence toward mommyblogging (which in some ways is an ambivalence toward motherhood in general), and got me engaging with ideas I don’t think I’ll ever be finished with.
And though these were both scholarly texts, I devoured them. And not just because they were telling me things I needed to hear at a trying time in my life, but because they taught me things I need to know, and they challenged ideas I thought I knew. These two Demeter books were incredible, and to think there will be no more of them is an enormous cultural loss for everyone.
Please read Ann Douglas’ blog on more about the ARM closure, and plans afoot to try to do something to stop it.
March 3, 2010
All winter long you wait for it
“All winter long you wait for it, knowing it’s coming, never really believing that it will.
Sticking your head out the door every morning from the first week of March on– nothing. Just one more scarf and gloves and plenty of Chapstick day. Shut the door tight, pull on an extra pair of socks and resign yourself to a lifetime of wet feet and cough drops.
Then it’s here, it’s really here, only when you’ve given up on it does it finally arrive, everywhere you look fellow spring-stoned zombies with their unzipped jackets flapping wide open in the warm afternoon breeze, sun-kissed perma-smiles on every stranger’s happily stunned face. “– from Moody Food by Ray Robertson
March 3, 2010
Canada Reads: Independently 2010: UPDATE 7
Fun fact I’ve noted is that two out of five Canada Reads: Independently picks reference my alma mater Victoria College. In Moody Food, Ray Robertson has his characters meeting up on the stone steps of Old Vic, and Carrie Snyder goes one better in Hair Hat and has her character in “Flirtations” return three books to the Victoria College Library (though was it the library pre or post renos? I wonder…). Anyway, I will try not to let these references colour my perceptions (and as the post below makes clear, I am always very open-minded when it comes to literary perceptions).
I am just about done Moody Food, which took a while to grow on me, but this afternoon when I was this far into the drug-soaked downward spiral, I found myself hooked. Though it’s pretty clear that things aren’t going to end well. Review to follow in a day or two…
Meanwhile, Julie Forrest (who I met today! She’s lovely) read Century this week, and she puts it on top of the rankings: “Powerful and poetic, Century tackles big issues for such a slim volume. Inadvertent as it was, I’m glad I saved the best for last.” Buried in Print struggled with Century, but found it not without rewards in her post “How many clever readers does it take to make a “great” book?”: “I can see that it’s well-written and carefully constructed, but I think I’ve missed a lot of what I was meant to notice, and that’s an uncomfortable feeling.” August reads Moody Food, and found it “damned near impossible for me to put down because there was so much life in it”, though as a self-confessed music snob, he didn’t buy The Duckhead Secret Society. He also read Hair Hat, hated the hair hat, but was more impressed with the book than he expected to be: “Carrie Snyder writes like she knows.” And my husband Stuart read How Happy to Be, finding its heroine reprehensible but, oddly enough, the book much compelling all the same.
March 3, 2010
Dogs and Waynes: My literary prejudices
As a reader, I must say that item seven of Lynn Coady’s fiction writing tips was spot on: “Actually, never write about dogs.” Or at least don’t, if you ever want me to read your book. I’ve written before about some of my literary prejudices (many of which lie behind my refusal to ever read The Secret River), and dogs are another. Books I’ve never read because of canine content include Where the Red Fern Grows, that book that came out last year called Apologize, Apologize!, Cujo, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, anything by Jack London (because my prejudice extends to wolves), and many more I’m not even aware I’ve missed. (Oddly enough, I was able to handle The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, but that was probably only because the dog was dead.)
I’m not crazy about dogs in real life, but I don’t think that’s the reason I shy from them in fiction. The prejudice probably finds its root in the fact that dogs on book covers screamed BOY’S BOOK whenI was a young reader. Because the dog always dies, and then I end up feeling like I’ve been toyed with. And also because I hate when a female dog is fake-casually referred to as “the bitch”, as though this expression has no other connotations. And then the bitch is always grossly birthing puppies, and one of those always dies too…
And speaking of literary prejudices, I must mention another, which is that I refuse to read anything written by anyone called Wayne. Really, this is completely irrational, but it’s deep seated, because I don’t know if there’s a more unliterary name out there (as opposed to, say, Judith, which pretty much guarantees you’ll write a book at some point). Wayne Booth notwithstanding, by the way, only because the notion of a literary theorist called Wayne is so absurd to me that it scarcely registers as being true.
March 1, 2010
Books in Motion #3
Today was a small girl wearing rainboots and riding a scooter that zipped past me on the sidewalk, a hardcover tucked in her brightly coloured basket. I caught up with her at the corner and inquired about the book she was transporting. And it turned out that this was not just any little girl, but a kind of strange one who is irresistible to adults but probably has trouble making friends her own age, and for four blocks she talked to me about the Lemony Snickett series, and how there are thirteen of them, and if I haven’t read them yet, I should. They’re about children whose parents die, and they have a guardian who only wants them for their fortune (and she pronounced “tune” in “fortune” like a song, and she kept saying it over and over.) Though I promised to read them, I probably won’t, but all the same, the little girl was the most delightful person I have encountered ever, like a character out of a book herself.
March 1, 2010
Freedom to Read Week: Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak
I wasn’t planning to observe Freedom To Read Week, but my Toronto Public Library local branch (big ups the Spadina Road massive!) made it particularly easy, with a display table sent up prominently by the check-out. I grabbed Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak, because I knew I’d have time to get through it, and also because I’d never heard of it before.
Now, here’s my confession: I’m not crazy about Where the Wild Things Are. It’s kind of cute, the boy in the wolf-suit, but overwhelmingly benign. (I have not read the Dave Eggers novel, but I’m going to. I have heard many good things about it, and perhaps it might open my mind to the Wild Things‘ depths?). Perhaps part of it is the playfulness of Sendak’s illustrations, as compared to Outside Over There whose pictures are positively sinister.
Apparently Sendak saw Outside Over There as the conclusion to a trilogy with Where the Wild Things Are and The Night Kitchen. (I don’t remember The Night Kitchen. I suspect this should be remedied). These three books, said Sendak, “‘are all variations on the same theme: how children master various feelings – danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy – and manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives.”
So I read Outside Over There, and my immediate reaction was, “Ban the thing! Think of the children! The children!” Or at least I could see how one might jump to that response, because the book is utterly mystifying. The pictures are really frightening, the text is weird and jumbled, the story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the whole book is troubling, in the way that so much about it is just not quite right, but exactly why remains elusive. I could not imagine wanting to read this book to a child, I could not imagine wanting this book to be read to me as a child (because truth be told, I always steered pretty clear of anything about goblins).
But on the other hand, if I could have got past the goblins, I could see how these would be pictures to get lost in. The baby is also a terrifically-drawn baby, who is screaming on one page and looks exactly like my daughter. Ida, the girl in the story, is the only illustrated little girl I’ve ever seen who looks like Virginia Woolf. And in the background of the pictures, strange scenes are set that aren’t explained and we’re left to wonder. To wonder too about the story, about Ida who is left to look after her sister while her father is at sea and her mother is (we assume) depressive. “Ida played her wonder horn to rock the baby still– but never watched.” So that the baby is kidnapped by goblins, Ida has to rescue her but makes “a serious mistake” that is never explained. She finds the goblins, all of whom have been transformed into fat babies. Ida only frees her sister by playing a song on her horn that turns the goblin-babies into a dancing stream but left her sister, “cozy in an eggshell, crooning and clapping as a baby should.” She returns home and makes a promise to always watch her sister and her mother, for her father, who “will be home one day.”
Weird weird weird. And how amazing is a picture book that pulls its readers so deep inside it but leaves them only mystified? A story that can’t be tied up neatly, or even properly understood, and must be returned to and considered, and flipped through again and again. Which isn’t to say that the book is necessarily good, or remotely satisfying, but there is something to it, surely. If I could only just begin to put my finger on what it is…
This 1981 NY Times Review of Outside Over There suggests the book has depths I’ve not begun to plumb– complex themes, sexual connotations, that “Mr. Sendak’s illustrations are evocative in so many different ways that for a self-conscious adult mind to enter the world of Outside Over There is to risk becoming paralyzed by the book’s allusiveness.”
According to this resource on challenged books, Outside Over There has been challenged, surprisingly, not for being maddeningly weird, but for references to “nudity, religion and witchcraft.” None of which I’d picked up on– is it possible my mind isn’t sick enough for this sort of thing? I think only the babies are nude, but are not babies often nude? (And now that I’ve started reading objections to banned books, I can’t quite quit. The Lorax “for criminalizing the forestry industry.” Murmel Murmel Murmel for “depict[ing] human reproduction”. And it would be so funny, if it weren’t actually true.
I am so glad that there exist children’s books that are so puzzling and complex and you’re never finished reading them. How much credit does that accord children’s minds, I think, and it’s brilliant. Even if the book troubles me in its vague, weird way– that kind of a reaction from pictures and a couple hundred words of text is really quite remarkable. And I’m even glad that someone wanted to ban this one, because otherwise, I might not ever have read it.
February 26, 2010
In the post and etc.
I just tramped out through the snow to collect today’s brilliant postal haul, which included a writing cheque, my new spaceage autoshare keycard, and a copy of Susan Telfer’s absolutely beautiful collection House Beneath. And really, it tops off the most wonderful morning, which I’ve spent listening to DJ Bookmadam’s playlist, reading An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym and issue 32.3 of Room Magazine. Drinking pear lychee green tea, while Harriet napped for almost two hours (!!). This morning following an evening during which I went out and spent my time in the company of inspiring, amusing women and ate lots of cheese while my husband put the baby to bed without me for the first time ever, and they both did brilliantly. All of which is to say that I am terribly, terribly happy today, and I tell you this not to be smug or rub it in, but because this is one of those good days that I want to collect like a postcard, to pickle away and keep always to remember just how fantastically beautiful the snow-covered world is outside my window right at this moment.
