April 13, 2008
Dancing about Literature
My short essay “Dancing About Literature” appears in Descant 140: Improvisations, which is in stores now. The piece is about the joys of literary blogging, which I’m so pleased to experience here and elsewhere. The issue also contains work by such notables as P.K. Page, Alberto Manguel, and Anthony De Sa.
April 13, 2008
Metaphoric Cake
Yesterday we held a small engagement celebration for our friends Jennie and Deep, and I baked a cake for the occasion. But because I didn’t want to brag, or give the wrong impression of my domestic prowess, even before I baked the cake, I had an idea about how I wanted to approach this blog post.
I wanted to explain that though I do have a reputation for baking a lot, I am not very good at it (and you will soon see why). I wanted to explain that although I have improved since the infamous butterfly cake I baked at Kate Wilczak’s Midsummer Party in 2000, I am still very much an imperfect baker. That not being good at baking hasn’t stopped me from doing a lot of it, but that a lot of this comes down to how much I really like eating. I would have added to this proviso also that I am not especially good at decorating cakes, but I wasn’t actually aware of this fact until yesterday.
But it turns out that none of this explaining is necessary, the cake being yet another chapter in Cakes Gone Wrong, the epic tale I’ve been writing for years now. It did not go terribly wrong, as everybody finished their slice, and when I came downstairs this morning Stuart was eating another for breakfast; people don’t tend to go for seconds of outright disasters. But the cake was, I will say, a bit dense, solid. I was terribly disappointed, as there is nothing more embarrassing than serving up a cake with the consistency of cheese. And worst of all– it was all my fault.
You see, I recently inherited a Sunbeam Electric Mixer. And not just any Electric Mixer, but one that had previously belonged to Rona Maynard. It had even been a wedding present from her mother, so really I could have sold it on eBay, but of course I wouldn’t dream of it, owning too few Canadian writers’ small appliances as it is (I expect you have the same problem). I also love the mixer aesthetically– it looks terribly cool up on the shelf here in our new kitchen. And I do dream of being Nigella, so I wanted it for mixing reasons too, of course.
But I’ve never used an electric mixer before. Have you? Did you realize that when you did used one, that you don’t actually have to do anything? That the bowl just spins and spins and the batter mixes just like magic, and the effect is hypnotic, and fabulous is a 1950s housewife styly, and I was thrilled and taking photos, and the batter mixed and it mixed and it mixed?
(Did you realize that a cake batter doesn’t really have to be so mixed at all? That a quick swirl with a wooden spoon would have sufficed? I sort of did know that, but oh, it would not have been so much fun. But maybe then, my cake would have turned out something like fluffy. It seems one can love their electric mixer too much.)
I mixed my batter for ten minutes.
My dear mother-in-law once told me that anything that gets eaten cannot be deemed a failure. Under such a standard then, my cake gets a passing grade. It was most definitely not a success, though, except in terms of lessons learned: in baking logic and mixer restraint. To make me feel better, everybody at the table decided to pretend that the texture was intentional: strength and density as a metaphor for Deep and Jennie’s love.
April 13, 2008
The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala
A year ago, a young British woman teaching English in Japan was murdered– to say brutally so just seems redundant. The story was big in the British press, resonating with me in particular as she’d worked for the same company I’d worked for when I lived there. The articles noting places I knew, cultural references that had once been my every day, the woman’s whole life familiar, right up until its ending which was so foreign as to be otherworldly, and this was my fascination.
It was distant enough to stay a story, however. It might as well have been fiction, until a couple of months later when I learned that as big as the world is, a good friend of mine here in Toronto had actually known the deceased girl. In fact she had been there when the girl went missing, a strange coincidence, but of course, not my story to tell. It was jarring though– the otherworldly transgressing into my own universe. Yet, with that universe remaining the same as it ever was. The multitudinous threads connecting me to a story that had nothing to do with me, and what kind of a narrative is that?
I have marked up most of my copy of Sharon Butala’s memoir The Girl in Saskatoon. I’ve underlined passages, written notes in the margins, drawn diagrams on the endpapers to get a better grasp of Butala’s arguments. And, as you can see, I’ve started my review on a tangent, but it ties up, I promise. All of this, I think, an appropriate response to Butala’s book, which is a veritable literary hybrid. Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package. Butala making her process transparent– her very act of containment the result of years of work. It only being natural that the pieces might spring back out again once the package is given to the reader. So do please pardon my tangle.
In 1962 in Saskatoon, the body of Alexandra Wiwcharuk, a twenty-three year old nurse and beauty queen, was discovered on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. She’d been missing for two weeks before her body was discovered, and it was determined she’d been raped and murdered; her killer was never found. Writer Sharon Butala, who’d been a classmate of Alex’s though not exactly a friend, has lived with this story quite central to her consciousness since then, as have many residents of Saskatoon. Butala approaches the story with questions in mind: what is its attraction and hold, what happens to the memory of it over time, how could something like this even happen? Moreover, “To a girl just like me, to someone I knew?”
The book begins with Butala revisiting the murder scene, observing no sign of what had happened. This disturbing in itself, but Butala extends this: if we don’t remember, then such a thing could happen to anybody, and become commonplace and unremarkable. The causality of this seeming backward to me as I read it– surely she means our not remembering makes it commonplace, and being commonplace, of course, it could happen to anyone? But I drew my diagrams, and I thought about it. Realizing that it’s not even the possibility of such an evil act in practical terms that so horrifies Butala, but the commonplaceness. If such a thing is commonplace, regardless of its occurrence, this means that evil is present where we are, altogether pervasive. And it’s coming to terms with this that is central to her narrative, as she struggles to “solve” the murder, to pin down the trouble to something specific. She can’t, such is the world, and this is one of the paramount lessons of her life.
We try to pin down cases like this not just out of curiosity, but to protect ourselves and our sense of security. Butala writes of reactions to Alex’s murder– if there is no killer upon which to place the blame, then surely Alex herself must be culpable. If the victim brought it upon herself, then we who play by the rules are not at risk. “The rules” being the strict and often contrary expectations placed upon women in the 1950s and early ’60s– that they must be sexual, but only so far, their limited choices for the future against the rest of the whole wide world.
There is a line we draw in our own consciousnesses, between what is possible and that which isn’t. Most often this barrier is quite literal– a movie screen– and our sense of order is disrupted when this line is violated. We try to maintain it all the same– “she was asking for it” being such a divide between us and her. Between us and the evil that Butala is trying to understand– forty years later she is horrified at the coldness with which she’d received the news of her classmate’s death, her lack of reaction: “…it would be quite a few years before I would teach myself that I had to tear that barrier down and allow myself to feel, no matter how painful, how horrible or sad– how very difficult it is to know the world as it is.”
And difficult to know in very practical terms also– initially Butala has a vision of gathering the pieces of this story, of putting them together as a writer does, and emerging with something complete, the mystery solved. She quickly realizes the process is much more convoluted: the pieces she gathers are mismatched, broken, contradictory, elusive. At one point she discovers that Alex had kept a diary, that that diary had bizarrely been written in code, that her sister had later burned it– these are the kinds of details she was working with. The official authorities putting up blocks in her investigation, withholding information. Eventually she realizes that “everybody had turf to protect, everybody had kept secrets; they had kept secrets from each other, and from me, and most of us, I was beginning to think, from themselves.”
The mystery is never solved, and even as readers we don’t get the whole picture. Throughout, Butala breezes past details of strange phone calls in the night, her phone being tapped, and “other scary incidents I haven’t put into this book”. This is quite a gap in the narrative, but not altogether out of place, being a narrative full of gaps and probably analogous to Butala’s own experience. She says herself at the end, that her book didn’t turn out to be about what she’d intended at the start: “I saw at last that there is truly no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle,a tidy satisfying end…. The story was, instead, about story”
And what story is about, instead of answers, is connections. However ultimately meaningless or incidental, for those people who create stories, connections are the hinges. Between Butala and Alexanda– their similar rural origins, they were in the drama club, that Butala had a summer job at the hospital where Alex would begin her nursing career. No, the two hadn’t been friends, hardly knew one another– just as I never known the murdered English teacher– but this very fact can make the connections all the more curious, significant.
Butala makes connections even more far-reaching– “that only months after [Alex’s] murder, Watson,Walter and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for their long work culminating in the determination of the molecular structure of DNA”, which might come to be important to the case. That the day after Alex’s disappearance, Marilyn Monroe would sing her infamous “Happy Birthday” to the US President. Butala writes, “By August, Marilyn, too, would be dead, the world offering certain undeniable benefits to pretty women, being also very hard on them.”
These connection
s are solid. The only thing incidental, I think, being that their connectivity is not their very point. And these threads are worked so thoroughly through the very fabric of our lives, so what isn’t significant then?
The story that Butala comes to write is that of two girls who, “although mere acquaintances and never close friends, had been linked by circumstance and history, and by memory.” An elegy for a disappearing world– I began to count the buildings Butala notes have been torn down, including the high school, movie theatre, the legion hall, the places where both she and Alex had lived. She is observing Saskatoon and having much the same reaction she had to the murder scene: how could anything have ever happened if there is no way to tell? This book being her testament.
Butala writes Alex as her parallel self, beautiful while she was plain, dead while she got to live. In their similar origins examining the possibilities of her own narrative, the story she has come to take for granted– but for a few details, the murdered girl could have been her. Butala acknowledges the strength she gains in creating this story, engaging with the world and feeling a part of it in a way she never supposed she could. But she invests Alex with just as much strength– the exchange is fair. Invests her with a voice, her story told however incomplete, and most of all with the fact of memory.
April 12, 2008
In lieu of a poem
Today, in lieu of a poem, I’ve written all about Poetic April over at the Descant Blog.
April 11, 2008
A room of one's own
The New House tour continues, and now I take you to my garret. For yes, it is true– I have a garret. Actually the tail end of a very long strange half-gable off our bedroom, through a secret door in the wall. (What quirks have old houses with dubious renovations of yore!)
We use this long strange room as our closet, which contains two dressers, a long rack of hanging clothes, and a whole mess of things like Christmas lights and suitcases, things you’d expect to find in an attic. And in late February when we saw the apartment for ten minutes and decided to make our home here, I didn’t realize how big this room was. Didn’t consider that it could possibly accommodate my desk and a bookshelf, but it does.
My husband was a wee bit disconcerted at the idea of me setting up shop in the back of the closet, but this is not just any closet, and it has a window. And there wouldn’t have been room downstairs for the bookshelves and both our desks (for he requires a desk too, of course, being a brilliant graphic designer). It’s not much to look at, I know, but it’s mine, and really I’m just fond of saying “my garret.” I think I’ve wanted one forever without even knowing it.
(And if anyone’s asking, I’m now reading A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock, and The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder.)
April 11, 2008
Everybody's Birthday
It might as well be everybody’s birthday
today, passing people clutching
balloon strings in their fists. The air is ripe
for a a stampede of pogo-sticks.
April 10, 2008
My bookish friend
I am now reading The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, which combines my loves of literature and True Crime respectively, the latter borne out of the paperbacks my Dad has always kept precariously stacked by his bedside. I finished reading Rose Macaulay’s My World my Wilderness, which read like such a precursor to the more contemporary British novels I adore so much– in particular a few by Hilary Mantel, Esther Freud and Penelope Lively. Also fascinating that it shares an epigraph with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and considerations of good and evil that tie in so well with Brighton Rock (both recent reads of mine). Oh books…
And oh, bookish friends: I’ve got many of those, with varying degrees of obsessions, but all of whom appreciate the pleasures. My friend Bronwyn, though, might be my one relationship that completely began and grew with a love of reading. We worked together as editorial assistants during the summer of 2001, our first conversation was about The End of the Affair, and we used to go out on our lunch breaks and spend too much money at bookshops like Nicholas Hoare, and (the late) Little York Books. We also shared a love for John Cusack, and were especially enamoured of the scene in Serendipity in which he went into Little York Books. We both moved to England in 2002, which only served to cement our bookish bonds, as bookishness is hard to avoid in England.
And I am so thrilled that in a month or so, Bronwyn is moving back to Toronto. With her darling husband in tow, of course, and she’s home again. We’ve been living oceans apart since 2004, and it will be a pleasure for our togetherness to once again be ordinary. Our bookishness live and in person, and Bronwyn’s not lost any of hers– in her email today she reported that she’s “packed up eleven boxes of books and barely made a dent”, and keep in mind that she is relocating continents. What a formidable book lover. Whenever I report any classic book that I’ve fallen in love with lately, she’ll usually be able to say that she was obsessed with it when she was eleven.
Anyway, I am doubly excited, because not only will she be back in town, but when I reported my absolute failure to turn up any copies of Rebecca at used book shops, she told me that has two in her collection (she was apparently obsessed with this one at age thirteen) and that I am more than welcome to one of them. How lucky!
April 10, 2008
I cannot
I cannot write a poem tonight,
it pains me now to say.
One could not have had a less inspiring
day than I’ve had today.
I could sit here and wrack my brain
and further ache my shoulders.
But I hope you don’t mind if ditch this for
a snack of yogurt and granola.
April 9, 2008
Rational Conscience
When a poet told me he knew suffering
because he suffered from ‘imposter syndrome,’
a psychoanalytic term assigned
to those who feel unworthy of any praise,
I never suggested to the poet
in his case, perhaps ‘imposter syndrome’
was better called ‘rational conscience.’
–from David McGimpsey’s “Irresistible”
April 9, 2008
Spring
There was never snow
here and I know naught
about all these scarves and hats.
Mittens stuffed into my pockets
must have been planted,
the coat too warm to be mine
anyway; where did it even come from?
