January 10, 2009
Bear With Me: Live!
At year ago I read actor/comedian Diane Flacks‘ book Bear With Me: What They Don’t Tell Your About Pregnancy and New Motherhood, and knew I was ready to have a baby because I’d read the whole book and still wanted one. Flacks’ book was hilarious, entertaining, well written and full of really practical advice that I’ve found useful already. My husband has since read (and enjoyed) the book, and I’ve recommended (and lent) it to friends. So how overjoyed was I to see that Bear With Me is now a play currently being performed (by Flacks) in Toronto? I’m looking forward to seeing it this month. Check out Flacks’ piece on her show in The Toronto Star.
January 9, 2009
Before you were born
“It was around here that I once said, ‘I used to work over there, before you were born.’
‘When I was a baby.’
‘No, before that. Before you were born.’
‘When I was just a teeny-tiny baby?’
‘No, before you were even here. Before you were in my tummy.’
‘I was…. Where.’
‘You were just a twinkle in your Daddy’s eye.’
‘I not a twinkle. I NOT a twinkle!!!’ And she started to kick and squawk. I suppose I did sound a bit smug; a little complacent about the idea that she was once non-existent. Too tough, really, for any age, but especially tough for two.” –Anne Enright, “Being Two” from Making Babies
January 9, 2009
Pickle Me This jumps on the Canada Reads bandwagon
I don’t usually jump on reading bandwagons, mostly because my tastes are so conventional, I’m more or less riding along already. But for some reason I feel the urge to read all the Canada Reads books this year, and the urge has come with enough time for me to actually get to it. So I’ll be buying the books this weekend, and am looking forward to new discoveries. Stay tuned for my reviews.
January 8, 2009
Links and birds
Now reading The Darren Effect by Libby Creelman, which is fabulous, and I’m right in the middle with no idea of what comes next. Maud Newton speculates about why copies of Lush Life (which I reviewed last month) are so hard to come by. Dovegreyreader encounters The Robber Bride. On the history of stenography (subscription required). Jon Evans wonders why he shouldn’t write about Africa, which led me to “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina. A short story by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. And more on used books.
I watched The Birds on the weekend, which is based on a short story by Daphne DuMaurier (whose Rebecca I so delighted in last year). I’ve not read the short story but checked out the plot synopsis and it seems as though the screenwriter really only used the premise– and yet… Though this is a full length film, it seemed undeniable that it’s source material was a short story. What we know of the characters and what happens to them is really not the point, rather the point is the moment (which is so incredibly terrifying, tacky special effects aside). So interesting to me how clearly the short storyness remained. I’ll have to read the story and see if it came about itself similarly.
January 7, 2009
The Hieroglyphic Streets
Marvelous blog find of today is The Hieroglyphic Streets, for biblio and actual travellers alike. The site gets points for its gorgeous pictures, thoughtful book selections, and excellent organization. How about Montreal, Budapest, North London, or Japan. Indeed, take me away…
January 6, 2009
Thoughts about used books
(Via Bookninja): Should we be ashamed of buying used books online? The article discussing secondhand sellers who work through sites like amazon specifically, where you can get a book for a penny plus the shipping/handling costs. I have used amazon second-hand sellers to purchase books, though usually as a last resort because a) the book I wanted was available nowhere else including the library, and my local bookshops or b)I was a student and couldn’t afford it otherwise (and also couldn’t find it in my local bookshops. I always looked first, never missing out on a reason to visit a local bookshop of course, and also because once the shipping/handling was involved, a used book online or off was about the same price). I would suppose that buying new books this way (incl. review copies, which are often available before the book is even in stores) is more than a little tacky, however. But then it is only in the past two years that I’ve become so privileged to be able to spread my bookish dollars so lavishly– not everybody can afford to drop $40.00 on a hardcover in order to feel (deliciously) smug about doing the right thing.
A bookninja commenter makes the very good point that using the library at the very least would provide authors (in Canada) with a small amount of money through Public Lending Rights— nothing a writer could live off of, but it’s the principle.
The problem is not with used books, however, but rather the emptiness of the online exchange. The NY Times article makes a comparison between such exchanges and Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff’s “classic account of a woman in postwar New York who bought her books from a London shop she never saw” noted as being “ahead of its time.” But the whole book captures the rich exchange between Hanff and the booksellers at Marks & Co. Antiquarian Booksellers, who encouraged Hanff’s book buying habits for years and years, supplementing her own requests with their recommendations– in short, doing what local used bookshops are meant to do, which is fostering a literary community, albeit via epistle. Local is a decidedly a relative term, and Hanff’s story is not the same at all.
I enjoyed a piece on the Guardian blog last week about Britain’s charity bookshops. Suggesting it lessens the compunction of depriving authors of the royalties if you know a few quid is going to Oxfam instead. The article noting the impeccable organization of most of these shops, the skill of their clerks at spotting a special book’s value. There is a charm to their shelves, which will always feature a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Fludd. When I lived in England, I was an avid browser, and found many a treasure that brought me to the till. And I feel that authors did ultimately benefit from my purchases, or at least the ones who’re still publishing did, because these shops gave me a route to their discovery and so many of them I’m devoted to now.
Are there any cousins more distant than new books and used ones? One eventually becomes the other, of course, through a certain evolution, but takes on a new kind of value with the change, will become a different kind of cherished. New books have their crispness, their cleanliness, and their smell– their margins at least are a tabula rasa, and a reader can feel like an intrepid explorer venturing out to see the world. Whereas used books wear their history on their pages, with their stains, their own peculiar smells, and stray hairs stuck inside. The names written in and then crossed out on the inside cover suggesting the hands that may have flipped through these pages, the people who might have read them. Suggesting all the readers in the world.
Any reader with integrity will understand that used books have their place, that new books have quite another one, and the problem really isn’t the system at all. Rather, the problem is these supposed “sheepish” bargain hunters who keep bargain hunting anyway, and whose articles should probably be headlined instead, “I’m cheap and a bit of a wanker.”
January 5, 2009
Hear me read.
Today I’m the reader reading at Julie Wilson’s marvelous Seen Reading, and I’m reading from Rebecca Rosenblum‘s Once, from the story “The Words” which I’ve loved for years– this passage in particular. I am reading in a bathroom with a book launch crowd outside, and Julie Wilson had to teach me to say “ennui”, but the rest I knew already.
January 5, 2009
On Context: Dream Babies and Great Expectations
The kinds of stories in Great Expectations: Twenty-Four Stories about Childbirth (eds. Dede Crane and Lisa Moore) are the kinds that any woman could tell. About labour gone long, rings of fire, gruff obstetricians, and idyllic birthing pools left unattended as women are rushed to the hospital in a cab. Certainly, after reading Ina-May’s Guide to Childbirth in a state of dumb bliss, I was in need of this sort of reality check: Stephanie Nolen’s contribution begins, “For about forty perfect minutes, I had the birth I wanted…”
Anyone can write about childbirth, and the experience of becoming and being a parent, but what I remain most grateful for is that good writers actually do. I felt this profoundly after reading Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work and Anne Enright’s Making Babies: that thank goodness novelists write about this sort of thing, for who else would be so capable of doing so? Of capturing the various sides of this most multi-sided and and ordinary event, and then casting them in a light that is entirely new. For anyone can write about this stuff, but not everyone will do it well.
So I had confidence in Great Expectations, which comprises contributions from Canadian novelists I love including Lynn Coady, Christy Ann Conlin, Karen Connelly, and Lisa Moore, as well as journalists (including Nolen), poets, editors, and other writers I should have already read. Caroline Adderson’s essay made me scream on the book’s first page, with its mother with the burst blood vessel in her eyes. “She paid at both ends, poor thing.” Esta Spalding’s essay on twinship followed, which broke my heart and made me fall in love: “Joy and sorrow. Twins.”
And onwards. I read this book in a single day, twenty-four births (at least) and the moment never ceased to be a miracle. I appreciated the points of view of the few male contributers (including Curtis Gillespie’s advice to those who follow him: “take off your wedding ring to avoid crushed fingers”). As a pregnant lady, I’ll note that Great Expectations is not an easy book to read, and certainly doesn’t serve to ease any fears (for I just learned new fears I didn’t even know I could have), but it was the context I found most reassuring. That this sort of thing happens all the time, and very often things go wrong, but then they’re okay, and in the end there’s a baby. How at the the end of her piece, Sandra Martin says of her children, “without them my journey would have been soulless.”
So 2008’s reading finished with Great Expectations, and I began 2009 with Christine 
Hardyment’s Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford, in which context is the object, providing the most fascinating illuminations. That we have always had “childcare experts” among us, from Rousseau (“Emile [was] the most famous childrearing manual of the age”) whose own history shows desertion by his father, and abandonment of his own children to foundling hospitals. “His dream children were born free, natural and innocent, but became instantly oppressed.”
Hardyment’s book is a 2007 update to her 1983 original, and surveys childcare advice and practice from the 17th century to the present day. She shows that advice and practice were not always the same thing, but that both were influenced by fashion, politics, and sociological changes– how one thing has always lead to another. During the 20th century, with “behaviourists” between the wars creating model citizens, post-war Soviet backlash leading to Benjamin Spock’s acknowledgment of babies as individuals, child-centred babies raising their own children, to how childcare manuals have become the “parent-centred” volumes we see today. And throughout all these changes, parents have been grappling (differently) with the same problems: how to deal with feeding (breast best or not, depending on the era), sleep patterns, intellectual development, and toilet training. The evils of mouth-breathing, however, thankfully have ceased to be considered.
In noting how successive editions of 20th century childcare bibles were constantly adapting with the times, Hardyment makes clear how our ideas of baby raising are always in flux. Which is often a good thing, some advice of yore completely ridiculous so it seems from where I stand– hanging apartment dwelling babies out of windows in cages for daily airings was one, as were midwinter dunks in cold rivers, and mothers who were amateur apothecaries.
But on the whole, Hardyment marks no divide between a “silly then” and “sensible now”; there is no such thing as progress but parents are going in circles instead. This perspective making Dream Babies as useful as it is fascinating and amusing, the past available for the choosing of its best ideas and not just ridicule. Also making clear that the contradictory advice of those most ubiquitous baby user guides is just as chaotic as it seems to be, and so it has ever been. This most interesting corner of history (and history is all corners) providing a context so absolutely necessary, for otherwise, how would we know not to be told what to think? Hardyment writes, “Manuals need to be kept in their place: tools, not tyrants, a helpful indication of the varied options that face us, not holy writ.”
December 31, 2008
The pause before the scones
Before heading downstairs to bake the final scones of 2008, I pause to post some New Years wishes. For 2009, I make no resolutions, because things will be changing whether I will them to or not, and certainly, I am no longer (as) in control of it all. During 2008, we drove down some amazing highways, saw new places (California!), found a new home, I read 155 (some) extraordinary books, I’ve written and published an amount that satisfies me, had fun in all kinds of weather, and enjoyed myself much in the company of family and good friends. For 2009, I wish health and happiness to those around me, a fat kicky baby in my arms, to read some more extraordinary books, and at least two handfuls of truly good days.
December 30, 2008
To be outraged and confused
And do you want to read about my December knitting projects? Because you can check them out here. Heather Mallick’s wonderful New Years Resolutions. I thought Tabatha Southey’s column was funny (‘I couldn’t help but wonder if I should take a page from her book. But then I thought, “Heavens no, it’s a Maeve Binchy novel and it’s absolutely drenched in mint cocoa”‘), but the commenters were outraged and confused. (Why are these people never embarrassed when they fail to get a joke? I would be, and I don’t even post my ignorance on national forums). Sandra Martin’s “Confessions of an Obituarist” was splendid. Vital context was acquired from LRB pieces “A Chance to Join the World: A Future for Abkhazia”, and “Lessons in Zimbabwe”.
