October 16, 2009
European Vacation
Of course, I married my husband for his dreamy accent, but also so I’d have a good excuse to take frequent European vacations. (And it is a European vacation, proof here.)
And it’s that time again, because we’re off to the British seaside– it’s October after all. We’re returning to my husband’s homeland so that his parents can meet their grandchild for the first time, and while they’re busy spoiling her and ignoring us, we’ll partake in English things we love and miss, like cream tea; cheap books, beer and chocolate; newspaper supplements; penguin biscuits; lamb shanks; round postboxes; crisps; good TV and radio. Oh, and the weather. We’ll pack the brollies.
I’ll be posting a few updates while I’m gone, as well as an eagerly-awaited interview, and regular posting will resume in a week.
October 16, 2009
Dear Spadina Road Branch of the Toronto Public Library
Dear Spadina Road Branch of the Toronto Public Library,
This is a love letter.
Though I’ve actually had a crush on you for years, and on this city’s whole public library system, but lately you, Spadina Road Branch, have truly captured my heart. Though you’re not very big, your hours are few, and there is often somebody asleep on your lawn, you have had an enormous impact on my life.
Though always an avid reader, I was not such a regular patron until my daughter was born in May. Upon my baby’s birth, I found the whole world had shrunk to the size of a small city block, and it took a long time to find my way around it again.
When my daughter was six weeks old, she joined the library. The library was a destination in an otherwise empty and lonely day, but it was fun to get her card, to select books that I would enjoy reading to her at home. I also borrowed children’s CDs so we could listen to music together. And after that, I began visiting the library once a week, taking out new books and music, and DVDs to watch with my husband, borrowing books from your collection about baby sign language, baby massage, games I could play with my daughter, and child development. And slowly, I started to feel like I knew what I was doing.
In August, we were invited to join a Baby/Toddler group meeting weekly throughout the month. This was informal programming, organized by staff with limited resources, in response to requests from other patrons. And the group became the highlight of our week, such an enjoyable way to spend an hour, and we learned wonderful new songs and games. When my husband came home from work at the end of the day, he’d be eager to learn whatever we’d picked up at the library that morning, and these songs and games have become some of our baby’s favourites. We look forward to returning to the Baby group later this month.
And then there’s your people, Spadina Road. Perhaps I should have started with your staff, for this is the point that I mean most of all. Being at home all day with my baby is harder than I ever imagined it would be, and some days are more trying than others, but all is usually assuaged with a walk through your automatic doors. Your staff is so kind and friendly to me, sweet to my baby, helpful with my requests and I’m always greeted warmly. Which makes such a big difference on the hardest day, and I hope your staff realize how much value they add to customers’ experience.
That because of them, the library is not just a destination, but one of my favourite places to go, and I feel so lucky to live in your neighbourhood.
So thank you, Spadina Road Branch, with love forever and ever,
Kerry Clare and Baby Harriet
October 15, 2009
A Tyrannical Poltergeist
“There is a sense in which all novels are ghost stories: fictional characters are translucent phantoms, which readers believe in (or don’t); readers lurk in the presence of characters, spying on their most intimate moments, eavesdropping on their innermost thoughts. And however thoroughly the novelist establishes her characters’ motivations, however robustly she forges her chains of cause and effect everything that happens ultimately does so at the whim of the writer. Certain things have to happen for the narrative to progress… Every novel is haunted by a tyrannical poltergeist, in the form of its plot.” from “Poltergeist: The Little Stranger” by Thomas Jones, London Review of Books 9 July 2009
October 15, 2009
Justification
Well, I have limited myself to purchasing only one book a month. But. We’re off to England on Friday, and therefore it only makes sense to order Howards End is On The Landing and Wolf Hall from there, as they’ll be either more widely available and/or a wee bit cheaper. And by the time I get back, What Boys Like will be out, and as I’ve been planning to buy that for ages, it doesn’t quite seem like my monthly allotment (which should be more spontaneous, you know). And that copy of Birds of America that arrived last week doesn’t count either, because I only bought it to get free postage on an amazon.ca order of CDs. So basically, we’re halfway into October and I haven’t even bought one book yet. I am very proud of my restraint.
All of this is a little less ridiculous, because I’ve been reading like a madwoman lately. Harriet’s naps have turned out to be much longer when taken on me, which means that I can read a lot and nap as well. So that’s what we’ve been up to lately, which leads to a Mommy who is better-read and less exhausted.
Now reading nothing! Or rather little bits of lots of things– I’ve been rereading Jennica Harper’s poetry, the LRB (I’m caught up to late July now), and the ROM magazine. Because I’m saving Birds of America for my holiday, and am too superstitious to start it before it’s time.
October 14, 2009
She loves the library
No one takes things personally like a new mom, I’ve found. Any advice I’m given, I take as a slight: “Oh, she sounds hungry!” I translate as, “You don’t have a clue what your baby needs.” “Perhaps you’d sleep better if she was out of your room” means, “You suck and you’re depriving your baby of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits.” It never ends. Everybody thinks they have the solutions, and I know I have no solutions, so I’m sensitive, you know?
Yesterday, however, my reaction was a bit over the top. I was at the library (picking up my reserved copy of The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Which is a titular lie– apparently I still have to solve them, and she just tells me how to via methods I am far too lazy to implement. My husband says we have no problems anyway and we’re doing just fine. [We do practice the EASY method already, by mistake, and it’s excellent]. Anyway, today I believe him and I’m returning the book to the library because it’s making me crazy) and the baby was squawking in her stroller.
“Oh,” said a fellow patron, not supposing who she was speaking to (naturally, as I am no one), “I guess she doesn’t like the library.”
And I flared up like a rash. “Of course, she likes the library. She loves the library. It’s her favourite place to come. We come all the time. She loves books, and text, and print media of all kinds.” Poor fellow patron looked frightened. I continued, “She’s just sick, bit of a cold. And she’s tired. And the sun’s been shining in her eyes. It’s close to her nap. We’ve been running errands and she’s sick of her stroller, plus, I’ve been depriving her of the opportunity to develop positive sleep habits. But she loves the library. Loves it, she does.”
Patron had disappeared by the time I was finished this tirade. Perhaps she’d slipped out the door while I was in the midst of my passion, and had sought hiding in a locked bathroom cubicle, I don’t know. But I am pretty sure she was a candidate for kind stranger most sorry she’d come across me yesterday.
And maybe Harriet just hates Tracy Hogg.
October 13, 2009
The English Stories by Cynthia Flood
This weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of being utterly captivated by Cynthia Flood’s collection The English Stories. The stories are linked by the experiences of eleven-year-old Amanda Ellis who travels to Oxford, England in 1951 with her parents. Her academic father is on sabbatical, researching for a book about Shelley and Keats, and the family spends their English year (which stretches into two) at The Green House guesthouse. When her father’s research takes him further afield, Amanda indulges in every colonial girl’s deepest fantasy by becoming a boarder at her school, St. Mildred’s.
The story title “The Margins are the Frame” gives a good impression of Amanda’s point of view. Amanda– by her age, culture, language and nationality– is alienated from everyone around her. And from the margins, her perspective of England, of home and away, of her parents and their relationship, of her schoolmates and teachers is surprising, misinformed, illuminating, tragic and true. And although Amanda is the anchor of the entire collection, the stories also come from additional perspectives– from other guests at The Green House, from teachers at St. Mildred’s, all of these characters on margins of their own.
This was an England not long out of war, in the throes of an age of austerity, coming to terms (or not yet) with fundamental changes in values and beliefs, and grappling with centuries of a empirical past that was quickly becoming irrelevant. And though Flood’s protagonist is young, her stories’ themes are not, which becomes the point– Amanda struggling with the gap between the world as it is and her limited understanding. Understanding which is little achieved here, for Amanda is only eleven after all, and then just twelve, and thirteen. Far too young yet for “coming of age” and Flood doesn’t do such neat resolutions anyway.
What she does do is a marvelous sentence: “At lunch on the rainy February day the King died, the sweet was custard and stewed damsons” opens “Early in the Morning”, or “The Spring term in which Kay died and Constance disappeared from St. Mildred’s, and I broke my glasses featured a school wide obsession with mealtime talk of sex” begins “Magnificat“. These sentences both convey the way in Flood encapsulates the world wide and near, the great and small, inside her literary universe. And while I want to write about my favourite stories and what each one was “about”, but I’m not sure I can contain all that in the space I have here.
But I will try: “Religious Knowledge” from the perspective of Miss Flower, teacher of religion, who has not yet mastered her own life and then becomes responsible for another when she learns about one of her pupil’s disturbing homelife; “Miss Pringle’s Hour”, the headmistress’s diary hiding a tragic love story inside it; “The Promised Land” shows the Ellis’ at the end of their sojourn and provides them with a new perspective on Canada (amongst other things); “The Margins are the Frame” in which Amanda takes up shoplifting, is ostracized at school, and learns that the maid at The Greenhouse is an unmarried mother.
But really, these descriptions don’t do these stories justice. With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn’t even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what’s around every next turn.
October 12, 2009
On Before Green Gables
It was an enjoyable and fascinating experience to finally read Before Green Gables, the Anne of Green Gables prequel written by Budge Wilson, published last year. Budge Wilson was an author I particularly loved when I was young– the Lorinda Dauphinee stories, including A House Far From Home, The Best/Worst Christmas Present Ever, and Thirteen Never Changes. She certainly had a formidable task set before her, to write the Green Gables book. And I began reading prepared for disappointment (after all, I’d once read Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley), but found myself enjoying it after all. There is nothing disappointing about this book itself.
But. Of course. I think what is disappointing is the entire exercise, and its execution. I’m not sure why we needed a “prequel” anyway, and then to have it written by a children’s author is rather incongruous with the original material. Because Before Green Gables is distinctly a children’s book– this is what Budge Wilson does, after all. In fact, it’s basically a pared-down version of Anne of Green Gables itself, as Anne– from the age of three or four– begins to entrance all who meet her (including her alcoholic wife-beating foster father), conjure magic in unlikely places, and spin the world into something delightful. And of course part of this is her nature, but Wilson has her nurtured too– her guardians display moments of genuine goodness, she meets a surfeit of generous, spirited school teachers along the way, she learns about poetry from her foster-sister who is uncannily Anne-like herself, she meets good friends, people look out for her, and not one heart here is not warmed at one time or another.
The thing is, however, that Anne of Green Gables was not a children’s book, or was not distinctly so. And however much all of the above events also came to pass in the original novel, where they achieved their poignancy is from the awfulness of Anne’s early life. The specifics are never made particularly clear, but such silence is telling– there is a reason Anne’s story began in Bright River. I believe Marilla Cuthbert alludes to this at some point, the unspeakableness of Anne’s early history, what she might have witnessed and been subject to in the homes where she spent that part of her life. Anne is who she is, not because of kindness she met along the way, but because of sheer lack of it. Her Anne-ness is primarily a survival mechanism in a brutal world where she was completely, utterly and scarily alone.
Her life from Green Gables was indeed a kind of fairy tale, but how dark is a fairy tale at its root, after all?
Budge Wilson has written a wonderful children’s book, but a children’s book doesn’t do Montgomery’s own work justice– or at least this one doesn’t. Because there is only light here, and Anne becomes a caricature. Before Green Gables also suffers from being so unorganic, where it is obvious that the narrative was always a means to an end and not the end itself. But what’s missing most of all is the subliminal, what’s left unsaid, all those aspects of the narrative that fly over kids’ heads leaving them sensing something there, and loving the story all the more.
Montgomery’s work was full of that stuff, which is why we return to her again and again.
October 9, 2009
Clare/Lawler Thanksgiving Menu
Butternut Squash Soup
Grandma Reynolds’ tea biscuits
Roast turkey with blue potatoes and rainbow carrots
Sweet potato sausage stuffing
Steamed broccoli
Cranberry sauce
Apple Pie
October 9, 2009
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
In the early 1990s, I sort of thought that Douglas Coupland would marry Naomi Klein, because he’d written a book called Generation X (that I hadn’t read because I was 12 and too busy reading true crime), and her column in The Toronto Star had the very same name. The match, however, was not to be, and this is apropos of nothing except that some things come full circle (while some things don’t, because Naomi Klein no longer writes lifestyle columns).
While certainly no slouch (he’s a novelist, an artist, recently a groomer of one enormous beard), Douglas Coupland has been doing the same thing for nearly twenty years. Which is fine, because apart from a few bookish missteps (which I’ve heard him reference as “failed experiments” and fair enough), Coupland does what he does very well. He writes quirky, pop-culturally infused literature that reads a bit like junkfood and/or sushi. His characters tend to all speak in the same kind of voice, peppered with colloquialisms, as self-aware as their author, victims of the air they breathe. He writes about lonely people in a world that is exciting, colourful and ripe with possibility, and somehow also cold and empty at the very same time. But then all these lonely people together are therefore not alone, and Coupland has made a career out of the hope of that. There is solidarity to be had in the collective voice.
His new novel Generation A is described on its jacket as “mirror[ing] Generaton X“, which isn’t really full circle either. Coupland revisits themes and ideas from his first novel, but this new book offers a re-evaluation. ‘A’ is very far from ‘X’, I mean, which isn’t exactly progress, but perhaps it is when that ‘A’ is a brand new beginning. And certainly time’s ripe for such a thing in Generation A, which takes place in the not-too distant future (2015, I think, because 34 year-old Diana was named for you-know-who, so I calculate her birth date as Royal Wedding 1981).
Everybody is addicted to a drug called Solon that allows one to live without thought of the future. And bees have also mysteriously died out, though life goes on thanks to synthetic pollination, but that can’t really be called life. Or perhaps that it is called life after all says something about how standards have fallen.
Then a bee stings a naked farmer in Iowa (who is plowing obscene shapes into his field of corn, and broadcasting live via webcam), and a young woman in New Zealand who’s making an earth sandwich, and a French World of Warcraft addict, a Sri Lankan call centre zealot, and a girl in Northern Ontario with tourettes. Officials swoop in, the stung are taken away to government centres for testing, and kept in solitary confinement for weeks. Once returned to their habitats, the five find they’re not safe from a crazed public to whom they symbolize hope (and plus their homes have been dismantled for complete investigation). So it is for their own safety that they’re each taken away and assembled on a remote island in British Columbia.
Why were they chosen? What binds this group beyond their bee-stings? And why do crates of Solon keep turning up everywhere? In a kind of Scheherazad-like task, the five are instructed to tell stories to save their lives. When they resist, they’re told that people have become so obsessed with their lives being stories, they’ve forgotten invention. And so the stories begin, and they’re actually wonderful to read (unlike the story within a story in Coupland’s previous novel [remember Glove Pond?] which was meant to be bad, but we still had to read it.) The five grow closer, and the truth gets nearer.
Generation A is funny, sad, illuminating, weird, and the world in a bottle. There is also hope. Coupland has decided against an apocolypse this time, opting for the Scooby Doo ending instead, and though anything that isn’t an apocolypse might be considered a high note, the bottle here is really half-full.
