April 6, 2015

Departures and Arrivals

We leave for our trip this week, and I keep waiting for that lull between our departure and the time in which nobody in our family is sick, but the window for such a thing is disappearing, and I am so very tired. And sick, again. There was about five minutes on Friday when I wasn’t, and then cold symptoms returned on Saturday morning shortly after my child threw up in a shoe store, which was a brand new milestone for all of us. But nevertheless, Easter was had, a holiday we celebrate for its pagan roots and not the Jesus bits. We’re all about the eggs, and the new life that comes with spring—I met a baby today who turns two weeks old tomorrow, and she was a miracle unfolding. We had a lovely visit with my parents, and saw friends on other days, and Harriet and Iris got the new Annie movie on DVD, and Harriet has watched it five times already. There are crocuses across the street. We are assembling our playlist, a CD of driving tunes for the journey from Berkshire to Lancashire (which I’m the smallest bit nervous about, Iris having just now decided that she hates cars. “Car, no. Car, no.”)

Tonight we’re watching the new Mad Men, which premiered last night, but we watch it on download from iTunes so are behind the people who watch it on TV. I don’t know what I’m going to do in a world without Mad Men, a show that has been such a huge part of my life for years now and which has seriously informed my reading life too. It’s a good time to re-share The Canadian Mad Men Reading List, which I made last year, and am seriously proud of. Oh, Stacey MacAindra. Maybe I’ll finally get around to finishing The Collected Stories of John Cheever. I still haven’t read “The Swimmer.” I’ve been saving it, I think, of the post-Mad Men world. In which I am probably going to go right back to Season One.

Today I found a poem about motherhood, bpNichol Lane, Coach House Books and Huron Playschool, written by Chantel Lavoie for the Brick Books Celebrating Canadian Poetry Project. I find myself struck by the poem and the various ways it connects with my life, and how literature and motherhood and the fabric of the city are all so enmeshed. Particularly in this neighbourhood.

And finally, I am in a peculiar situation book-wise. I don’t know what books to take with me on vacation. Now, on a certain level, bringing any books on vacation is simply stupid because all I ever do when we go to England is buy books. And when I look at my to-be-read shelf now, no contenders jump out on me—nothing good for an airplane, nothing I am truly destined to love, no book with which I’d be thrilled to be holed up with in an airport terminal. You can’t take chances in a situation like this! So I have decided…to bring no books with me. This is truly the wildest and craziest thing I’ve ever done. This year, at least… To pick up a book at the airport, and trust I’ll find the right one there, and then live book to book. No safety net. This is terrifying. And yet potentially exhilarating, rich with adventure. The book nerd’s equivalent of jumping out of the sky.

June 15, 2014

The Difference a Year Makes

We have come very far since Father’s Day last year.

Which makes me think of this song, which seems fitting for Father’s Day since Mad Men, actually.

September 3, 2013

How Television Saved My Life. Part Deux.

Once again, television came along this summer to make life with a new baby quite bearable. For the first six weeks of Iris’s life, every day was pretty much a mad scramble to 9:00 or so when we would sit down and take turns having the baby sleep on us while we delighted in excellent TV. We particularly loved watching the BBC drama The Hour, which was stylish, gripping and a stunning example of what female characters can be when women are writing them. In tragic news, the show was cancelled after two seasons, and left on a cliff-hanger. I have been pining for Freddy Lyon ever since.

We also watched Girls, which I’d been nervous about. Somehow in all the politics and furor around the show, I’d neglected to understand that it was a comedy. Sometimes I wonder if its critics didn’t get that either. We are looking forward to watching Season 2.

And now we’ve just started watching Mad Men Season 6, having saved it for a time when our evenings were a little less chaotic. Oh, it’s so good. Season 5 was a bit of a let-down, though still pretty remarkable, as we affirmed as we re-watched it recently. (Because yes, I have basically just been watching Mad Men over and over for about 3 years now. It probably is a good thing that I finally watched another show.) But Season 6 really does seem to be a return to brilliant form.

August 30, 2013

Peach Pie in Progress

The best part of living with me is my insistence upon baking when it is 37 degrees outside. Pictured here is a pie in progress, peach, baked to be taken away on our trip this weekend with my best friend of 20 years and her wonderful family. (When they were just starting to be a family, I wrote about them here. There are three of them now in their family, all excellent.) And I am just checking in right now as we’re waiting to confirm that Iris really is asleep before we watch Mad Men. I had a really wonderful visit to the doctor’s today where it was pretty much confirmed that my career prospects for neck modelling are shot. I am to invest in turtlenecks and pretty scarves, and live with this lump as long as I possibly can. (I can’t help but feel that Nora Ephron had no idea; I also think that if I end up with as few years on earth as Nora Ephron, I am going not to spend none of them feeling bad about my neck no matter how lumpy or eventually scarred it becomes. The great thing about never having been particularly good looking in the first place is that you’re not really losing much when you start to be hideously disfigured.) My biopsy results were inconclusive, as there were so few solids in the sample, but as my lump is cystic, the doctor assures me that the chances of it being cancer are slim. I believe him. This lump will be an ongoing concern, but not so concerning, and anything “ongoing”, of course, means that I am not going to die. It also means that I have to stop getting so excited whenever I have it tested, because it’s going to happen every six months. And so it goes. This is life with a body. I feel very, very lucky.

April 3, 2013

The Sally Draper Poems

While I never finished reading The Collected Stories of John Cheever, which has been sitting on the table before me now for more than 2 years, my literary obsession with Mad Men continues, as does my obsession with Mad Men in general. (We have spent the last while rewatching the entire series, and are now partway through Season 4. We will save Season 6 until our baby sleeps for at least an hour at a time. Basically, I do not care to acknowledge that there are any other televisions shows in the world.)

So I was overjoyed to read “The Sally Draper Poems”, written by one of my favourite poets Jennica Harper. These poems are so very good, demonstrating Harper’s sharp wit, gift for voice, and her amazing sympathy with a young girl’s perspective. I love the texture that they add to the Mad Men universe.

See also:

• My post, What Sally Draper Must Have Been Reading
• The poem “Don Draper” by Nyla Matuk, who has just been nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

November 15, 2012

Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place

One day when I finally get my act together, I will write an enormous blog post about how this summer we ended up buying every single book Virginia Lee Burton ever wrote. The entire Virginia Lee Burton library, which now lives on a shelf in the living room, rather than in Harriet’s room with the other kids’ books. Harriet adores them all, and they mean a whole lot to all of us, actually. I read Burton’s biography last year, and it only increased my appreciation for her work, for her genius. To learn how important she considered book design to be, how innovative she was as an illustrator, the extraordinary praise her sons had for her as an artist and as a mother, the richness of her life, and her vision. I learned that beyond her books, Burton was also a well-known textile designer, founder of the Folly Cove Designers artistic community. She was brilliant, and her work is timeless, and her ideas have influenced the way I’ve come to understand the world, and my relationship to my child.

So in all my enthusiasm, I was pleased to discover a 2008 PBS documentary about Burton called Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place. Stuart and I borrowed it from the library and sat down to watch it last weekend, and while much of the material was familiar to me from the biography (whose author acted as a consultant for the film), I enjoyed the movie very much. Interviews with Burton’s sons, friends and fellow-artists, and even Dickie Birkenbush himself! Other interviews with children’s authors, librarians, academics and artists provided great context to Burton’s story and underlined her singularity.

I don’t know that I’d ever paid attention to Burton’s books’ feminist angle. She wrote with her sons as her intended audience so that her subject matter is decidedly “boyish” (not that it stops my girl!)–a train, a steam shovel, a snow plow, a cable car, a horse in a Western. But all her subjects–the train, the steam shovel, the snow plow, the cable car, the house and even the Little House herself–are charactertized as female. The female characters are equal partners with male characters, independent, strong and hard-working. Which provides me with a whole new level of appreciation for these books, though it’s not as though I needed one…

See also: “What Sally Draper must have been reading: Virginia Lee Burton and Mad Men”

More details about the doc are here.

July 15, 2012

Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the 6th read

I do make a point of often rereading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but mostly because it’s just that quite often I get the urge to do so. And it’s usually summer when I do, like last week on the coattails of Valery The Great. I read Slouching last in 2010, and wrote quite a bit about it. This time, my reading around was coloured by having read Didion’s new book Blue Nights last fall. I’ve already written about how much her new book is a response to the voice we hear throughout this book, to her 32/33 year-old self who imagines (in “Goodbye To All That”) that she’ll never be so young again, who has figured that “someday it all comes” and that it even stays.

And yes, it’s jarring to encounter Slouching… with the perspective of Blue Nights. I’d never thought about Quintana in the context of the “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” essay, but I wondered where she’d been, and noticed Didion herself in the essay more than I ever had before: “Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable.” I think of the simplistic way that Quintana herself is described in so many of these essays: “Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singular blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” Quintana was one when that essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” was written. It’s so odd that the normally astute Didion would ever imagine that any person, especially in their infancy, could be so known.

I reread this book with the perspective of Mad Men too, and Lucille Maxwell Miller in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” came right out of the world, even on the opposite coast. Same with the “Slouching…” essay, the disintegration the show begins to grapple with in Season 5, which ends with the beginning of 1967. And yes, this essay reminded me of the present too, as it probably ever will, but even more than it did when I read it two years ago:

“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snaked shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”

I understand the “Personals” essays better and differently every time. I love “Notes from a Native Daughter” which is a preview of one of my favourite Didion books, 2002’s Where I Was From. I continue to find “The Seacoast of Despair” completely incomprehensible, every single one of its references a blank space for me.

And, mostly profoundly, I think I have finally grown out of “Goodbye to All That”. I still think it’s as lovely as I ever did, but it no longer makes me want to hang yards of yellow silk from my windows and cry in Chinese laundries. I no longer think it’s romantic. It’s dawned upon me that the voice of experience in that piece is still so absolutely, so tenderly young. Blue Nights, of course, emphasized this point, but I probably would have seen it anyway. I still love the part where she writes, “I would stay in New York, I told him, for just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed for eight years.”

But I’m started to realize that who we were at 23 means less and less as we get older, and that the decade we traverse to get to 33 is still absolutely nothing compared to the journey just beginning. That we shall be made so young and stripped of our illusions over and over again.

April 15, 2012

Only in hindsight

I loved Stephen Marche’s piece “The Persistence of Mad Men”: “Everything in Mad Men is predictable, but only in hindsight.” Marita Dachsel and Carrie Snyder, two women I like and admire, have a conversation about The Juliet Stories, motherhood, and the writing life. Carrie Snyder also turns up at Blog of Green Gables writing about the various stages of reading with her children. I love that Sarah Tsaing is writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto this month. Sarah is also on the New Generation of Canadian Poets, which has its own page at Amazon. Jonathan Bennett on Kyo Maclear’s Stray Love. Nathalie Foy likes Jo Walton’s Among Others. My friend Erin gave me a Cath Kidson Diamond Jubilee mug (which should go really well with my new bunting, which is due to arrive in the post soon. And how amazing that I get to spend the next couple of weeks anticipating bunting in the post [because is there any greater state of being?]). Blogs that are interesting me lately and challenging notions of the form: Habicurious (“Exploring the intersection of people, their housing and communities”), and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s May I Stare At You?, and Heinonen on writing and reading fiction (in particular, lately, “The Notebook Habit and the Hell of Notebooks“). Richard Florida on “Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents”. And finally, we’re currently building a box city at our house (of cereal boxes, pasta boxes and very much lately of tissue boxes) as inspired by Alfred Holden’s Beaver, whose exhibition Stuart and I went to see years ago.

March 25, 2012

Ice cream

The ice cream shop at the top of our road has opened for the season! They remarked upon how enormous Harriet has grown, and they were kind enough to refrain from mentioning that she was also very filthy (and do note, she has since been bathed). In other local news, yesterday I went to the movies for the first time in nearly three years. We saw Friends With Kids, and I really liked it (its portrayal of breastfeeding in particular, which goes a long, long way). We also bought tickets for a train journey to Ottawa, served clafoutis to friends at brunch yesterday, started reading Tales from Moominvalley, finished watching Downton Abbey Season 1, and are having to wait for Mad Men Season 5 to come out on DVD because we do not have a TV. Which is sad, but also nice to know that my dream of continually having Mad Men before me is forever coming true.

March 14, 2012

From the reaches

Coach House fails to imPress the 3-and-under set or maybe they're just overwhelmed

From the reaches of the internet, I bring you Kyran Pittman on blogging and book-writing (“As we move away from our attachment to the vehicle, I’m noticing recently a subtle shift in the blog culture’s attitude toward publishing books”). Paper Tigers Blog reviews Joan Bodger’s Court and Castle. Behind the Mad Men twitter accounts (which I refuse to believe aren’t authentic). Lauren Groff’s Arcadia gets a rave review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories gets love from Quill & Quire. Snyder’s book is also called one of the best books you’ll read this year by CBC Books in this excellent list of Canadian women writers you need to read right now. And she blogs for The Afterword about why she loves her cover art. An interview with the fabulous Caitlin Moran that references wanking to Chevy Chase (and I am so excited that so many of you want to read her book now. But of course you do!). The VIDA 2012 Count and why it doesn’t matter how many women submit to literary magazines. DoveGreyReader finally reads Possession. The spring session of my blogging course at UofT begins in one month! You can register here. And check out Kyo Maclear’s Picture Books for Grown-Ups list— I absolutely adore it. Now reading Death Comes to Pemberley, which I’m probably enjoying more than the Austenites and now I want to read Pride and Prejudice again (and let’s just say I never thought anything would make me want to do such a thing). Finally, we bought a Sam Cooke hits CD recently which has revolutionized how good it is to be at our house. Everything is better when Sam Cooke is playing, and we’ve been doing a lot of dancing in the kitchen and drinking more wine. My favourite song of the moment is the wonderful Bring It On Home.

And yes, I’ve decided to bring back my links round-ups which is a bit 2007, but twitter is too ephemeral for some things. Plus I can post photos of Harriet as accompaniment.