Fifteen Days

My friend Blatch, as the author is known, has written an adventure book. Fifteen Days refers to key dates in the Canadian battle to save Afghanistan, mostly from itself. The book is meant to illuminate the new Canadian military for those of us who thought Canada didn't have one.

In many ways there could be no better assignment for Christie Blatchford. She is one of those rare women who truly loves men, especially those who do brave things with uniforms on -- cops, hockey players, soldiers for example. She loves those who do their duty. Who feel they have one in the first place. There is an early scene in this book where (and I am going to get ALL the terminology wrong) a platoon was doing a route reconnaissance and spotted Taliban. Official procedure is to note this information in the official way, exactly the same each time, which is to announce "contact, reference X, 600 metres left" or somesuch. Instead what the eyes of the platoon barked to the others was "Jim, they're on the right! Fuck 'em up!" That boy, whoever he was, just won himself a spot in Blatch's heart forever. She loves that kind of get-it-done.

Now that I think about it, who WOULDN'T love that man? That was bloody sexy, what he did.

As I say, Blatch loves manly men, not for what they can do for her status or bank account or how they can worship her wonderfulness but rather in a pure and admiring way -- she simply loves that mysterious club they all belong to where they innately know how to do things like "fuck 'em up" and are willing to go there and do it, whatever It is. Those of us who live in big cities with all their urban glossy-haired fat-free-yogurt-eating metrosexuals, could easily have thought this breed of man extinct.

The men described in this book are heroic. Solid, true, decent, and that rare thing, brave.

I am not far into this book, which reads like a Boys' Own adventure novel, fast-paced and exciting, not unlike great hockey coverage actually, and what is starting to really hurt is knowing as I read about this man or another, he is going to die. I'm going to lose him. I know he (or she) is one of those killed in battle and I can hardly bear it. Imagine the high price Canadian families to whom this man is son, lover, dad, pay for this effort, and they pay it willingly.

I would tell you more but I have to get back to my book.

The Uncommonn Reader

What a charmer, what a delight, what a fantastically wonderful and clever little story this is! The Uncommon Reader is of course the Queen and she becomes ADDICTED to the written word to the chagrin of all around her. But that is just the barest outline, what is so compelling is the wit with which this fable is written.

Imagine if you will the equerries fixing the crowd so we can be through by lunch, pre-populating the crowd with the answers to the usual dopey questions so they don't have a fit of "omigod it's the QUEEN", teaching small talk on the fly. But then the Queen stops asking where they're from and how long was the drive and asks -- egads -- what they are READING!! Stunned, flummoxed, caught for words they croak uh ma'am, I'm from Brighton.

Well, something like that.

There is a lovely scene where the Queen decides to honour these authors she has come to admire so much and learns the lesson we all do. But for a meagre handful, when it comes to authors it is all in the book. A more dull or self-ref-and-reverential crowd you are unlikely to meet. Back when I was in book retail we used to want to seduce our customers by holding "Author Events" which were readings at their worst (seriously, unless you are in your jammies and about to go to bed do you want someone to read aloud? their own stuff?) or brief (sweet brevity) chats about the inspiration behind the book. The one exception was Martin Amis and if you ever have the chance to hear him speak about anything, go. Another exception was the youngest daughter of Charles Lindbergh whose name escapes me, who wrote some kind of memoir. Could have been interesting, given that the most famous Lindbergh child and the only one anyone can readily bring to mind is a dead baby. She told the story of taking her own son to see a Lindbergh museum, where the Spirit of St. Louis was housed. The museum keepers had a cherry picker there so that she and her son could rise from the ground and see the famous airplane up close. She reached her hand and touched the cockpit and said to her boy, "Isn't this amazing?" and he said "Yeah!!! For sure!!! I've never been in a cherry picker before!!!!" The book bombed but the event was nice.

The Queen's author event was not this successful.

The Uncomon Reader is, sadly, a short book but please, please, read it. It will make your day.

Wild Mary: A Life of Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley is a British author whose career took off like a shot at the age of seventy-something. This is brilliant news for those of us suffering yet another mid-life crisis.

As happens with many a biography, the introduction is the best part. From this excellent precis we move on to a rather tedious array of dates and dates -- who Mary was seeing or slept with during what month and year -- sort of putting the pin in the idea of "wild".

But back to the intro for a moment. Here we see Mary, the widow of a failed writer, who has written a kids' book which was published without much financial success, who cannot make ends meet, whose kids are strange or estranged, who suffers illness on top of poverty, who has one of those literary agents who, finally, after trying for years to flog the mss for Jumping the Queue and Haphazard House, sends an "encouraging" note to her client: "I don't feel we would have much chance of anyone willing to take either of these books. However I shall be very happy to keep the Mss and mention them to publishers as I see them, just in case someone is adventurous enough to give it a try." Damn me with faint praise! Luckily Mary took much the same view and then matters into her own hands.

What this wonderful intro shows is that Mary was too down and out to even be counted as down and out. That's how out. Her diary during one weekend reads, for each day, "ILL. Very ILL. Very ILL, raving. very ill." And then something wonderful happened.

Mary sold her damp cottage and moved and then, only then, life took off. Finally a publisher took her odd and adventurous Jumping the Queue, about a casually cruel and used up, cheated upon wife's decision to simply off her self (charming? indeed. Blew the dust off that British middle class "we're so lovely" thing) and voila, Mary churned out a book a year to raves for the next decade.

What Mary shows is that however dreary and despairing you may feel, so long as you are alive you still have a chance. And, slightly less maudlin, eventually perhaps talent will out. Mary's voice as a writer is fresh, acerbic, true and what she proves is that life didn't start with YOU -- your grandmother's generation was at least as sinful, smarmy, adventurous, crazy, sick, perverse, fun, funny and vile as yours. She just didn't say so at dinner parties and then publish the memoirs. Mary had the courage to say so.

I found these pages terrifically inspiring. Had I been sick and raving in a damp and remote cottage with nary a soul around to give a shite, had I been married to a hugely ineffectual dreamer, had I bothered to have kids who then could not be bothered, had I been impoverished and repeatedly spurned for the one thing I thought I could do (write), well, I may have jumped the queue. I tend to think if WILD SUCCESS has not found me yet, it never will. Ha. Mary was still reeling at my age, and WILD SUCCESS was still years away. But it was there, as was a hugely energetic and prolific and exciting LIFE. Amazing! She could NOT have felt any better than I do and look what happened!!

Now, if the rest of the book were as light and cheering as this we'd have a best seller for the ages. Sadly, the book tames Wild Mary. But, I'll press on and let you know if there are any other great lessons to be found. Suffice it to know that life starts when it starts, and isn't confined to age.

The Girls, again

As it turns out, The Girls is not exactly as I thought it was.

The girls are conjoined twins and they are about to die because, well, conjoined twins do not live all that long and because one of them has an aneurysm that is about to end her life which means the other will die, too, by bleeding to death.

Being conjoined means of course that there is literally a shadow, a friend for life, the "other" who we are truly attached to -- but what this wonderful book shows is that as close as two people can be, it is impossible still to know one another.

The twins remember things differently though clearly they both witnessed the exact same thing; they protect each other from truths deemed to painful; they are often annoyed with one another. But most surprisingly, though they share every single thing, they don't know each other terribly well.

So, on a fundamental level, we are each utterly alone. No matter how attached we believe ourselves to be.

The Girls

Perhaps all of life is the search for The Other, that soul which completes your own. Isn't this the promise of all love affairs, isn't this the hunger that makes spinsters and bachelors crazy?

In other hands The Girls by Lori Lansens would be peculiar or downright macabre. One thinks of Barbara Gowdy and her fascination with freaks and their strange ways, forced upon them by mismatched anatomy. A story detailing all their ins and outs probably tells us something about the human condition but not anything that you can take with you to a dinner party. The Girls, on the other hand, uses a peculiarity to tell the truth about something common to us all.

Ruby and Rose are conjoined twins, attached to one another literally at the head and therefore deeply attached through the heart. Ironically, because of their fixation, they cannot see one another and rely on mirrors when they need to look each other in the eye. Imagine being so close to someone and not to be able to actually SEE them -- isn't this something interesting to contemplate? How much of knowing is seeing, and how often does someone we know very well become invisible. What the soul knows the eyes don't need to see.

Well, it's a thought anyway.

Being so strange means in some ways that they have each other but no one else; they literally cannot live apart. All of life is a negotiation and every second is obviously spent with a witness -- you can see that there is a down side to having so close a soul mate.

The "other" is also the thread woven throughout The Thirteenth Tale, where Margaret was a conjoined twin whose "other" was sacrificed so she could live. She seeks her other constantly, and sees her in the reflection of her own face in mirrors and blackened windows.

Both books are fantastically good. Both describe a closeness and yet a yearning for something intangible which is missing, a lack that must be essentially human.

Like Margaret, I have always wanted a sister at the very least, a twin at the best. I have missed my unborn sister terribly. I don't imagine her so much anymore but when I was a child I felt her absence acutely, my ballast against the cruelties of the world.

The thing is, and it is just a passing notion, even if my sister and I were joined at the head if not the hip, there are things she would not know or like. Even conjoined we are essentially alone.

How sad is that?

Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps we can live in our own private paradise no matter what.

Between the lines

Amazing what you can read when you are ready to read between the lines.

All the fearsome truths, all the dangerous realities, all the things too frightening to face lie there plain as day, upright and ready.

You learn, between the lines, what the end of the affair really means. You read what the boss actually wants of you -- less you, more company mandate and task at hand; in fact, best if there is no "you" at all, just the delivery of numbers, business, perfect projects accomplished with the least amount of kerfuffle possible. Just say "yes" in the language he best understands.

Mostly understand what the cowards are trying to say -- they are the ones who most frequently lurk between the lines. If the words are wonderful and the actions are less so, you are in this netherworld.

It is easy to misunderstand what Between the Lines actually means. We are taught to forgive, we are taught that relationships are hard work, we are taught to accomodate.

If I were ever to have a child (and I will not) or if I were ever responsible for the guidance of one most especially a girl I would say this. Read the writing on the wall. Take the news bravely. Accept it and move on, knowing that you are worthy of better news and better treatment. This will protect you from having to live with the lies and deceptions of those who can't quite say clearly what they really mean. You'll see it in the first place.

Eat a little something

I am commitment phobic only as an eater. Despite the most imploring waiters trying to seduce with today's most special special or catchiest catch, I would rather have three appetizers or five bites from someone else's plate. This drives my friends and lovers crazy. It's amazing how possessive some people are about their food.

So, it was a wonderful affirmation of near Oprah proportions to read the New York Times' story on the death of the entree. (for a full bite of the real thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/dining/05entr.html) The rationale? Too many bites of one substance is just too....boring. Now, those of us raised to feel guilty for all the starving children in countries denied the luxury of grey beef and over-cooked vegetables will certainly suffer an anxiety attack at the thought that decent food is "boring" but that is what makes one newspaper a courageous truth-teller while others are merely earnest.

" “As a diner, the idea of me chewing 17 bites of one thing and another 17 bites of another is absolutely boring, and not how I want to eat,” said the chef Mario Batali." Can you get over that? How ballsy!

But the thing is, and it has been the thing for a while, it's far more fun to taste a lot of things than to settle on just one choice. I don't know what your excuse is but it is sheer ADD on my part. I can't actually decide or focus on WHICH kind of shrimp I want, or whether the lamb dumplings are preferable to the crab. Let's get them all.

When you think about it, this is more suited to our lifestyle than the plate of protein with a side of starch our parents and grandparents felt was their due. We are not ploughing fields. We are not hammering nails. We barely need more than a bite in order to keep all functions functioning. That we want to spend that bite or two wisely, to make it an experience, is in its own way practical. Eating is not mandatory in the way it was for toilers and hewers, it is now a social experience. Don't skimp on it.

Black Swan Green

I didn't think growing up had much to say for itself except that one day we knew it would be over. As a sad kid I always projected myself into the Future, where things would be better (they could not be worse) and I lived more happily in this fantasy world than in the real one.

Lately though I've been drawn to books either intended for young people intent on growing up (it does seem to be a choice nowadays) or about young people trying to grow up, and the latest in this reading series has been Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, touted as being the "British Catcher in the Rye." Always beware of these sorts of references. They are never true and frankly do a disservice to both books.

Leaving that pet peeve aside, this is a good book. In it we have 13-year old Jason Taylor who lives in a sleepy village called Black Swan Green where there are no black swans or swans of any colour. Jason stammers, different from stuttering, which makes speaking a high-pressure situation. Imagine having to dodge words fast enough not to give away the fact you are dodging them; imagine not being able to rely on your very self to speak your very own mind.

For a number of reasons central to who he is Jason is set upon by bullies. I liked this part very much, having lived in a few sleepy places myself. Those who live in big cities, I've noticed, talk about the pastoral pleasures of small town life and in my experience small towns are more venal and vicious than a city in that word spreads faster and you can't get away from it, there are no other circles for you to live in.

Behind this drama is another one. Unbeknownst to Jason, because he is young, and obvious to us, his parents' marriage is disintegrating. What is also clear to us but not to Jason, his dad is hanging by a thread at work. This is nicely played in the book, a champion bit of writing in that Jason pays no never mind to the signs and we can't miss them. See, we did learn a few things along the way after all.

Jason is bullied mercilessly and frankly, not being overly astute politically myself, I could see no way out of it. But all of a sudden Jason grows up, grows into himself, takes on the bullies in his own way, tells the truth, tells lots of truths and suddenly, simply by standing up for that very thing, the truth, the sting is gone. Bullies slayed. The crippling fears he has felt disappear. All in the power of a small action and a few clear words.

Jason grows up, in other words, and it happens all of a sudden as it probably does in life. Is that how it is? One day we are children and then another day, all of a piece, we are not? I liken this to the stomach flu, my best definition for utterly defined and impermeable states of being -- in illness we cannot actually imagine ever feeling well; healthy, we cannot imagine the feeling of sick.

And while Jason has been as benignly indifferent to his parents as they are to him (well, except for the fear of punishment thing) and despite the fact his father seems a prat, the fact his family is shattered is a change he finds hard to take. Naturally. His father has nearly bankrupted his family to look after another woman which believe you me is the talk of the town in good old Black Swan Green, but life is not so stark. As it turns out, the woman is a childhood friend, far more plain and speaking less "posh" than Mum but nonetheless the one dad prefers (to be brutal about it) or the one that fits him better. The father, now that his own truth is out, is softer, kinder, more human.

Leaving his home for the last time, the home that is no longer his in any way, Jason fights tears -- after all, he's a man now and nearly 14. "It'll be all right," his older sister says. "In the end, Jace."
"It doesn't feel very all right."
"That's because it's not the end."

So there you go. As far from childhood as we may be, there's still something to learn. If it still hurts, it's not yet the end.

With the Grace of Liberace Go I

Is it cheating to write about books other people have read which I have not read myself? Oh dear, we hate to cheat.

In my beloved NYT I stumbled across a story written by a soul sister. She felt she gave awful parties and so did some research and began collecting books on "gracious living" written years and years before Martha Stewart put pan to parchment paper. She found "cheerfully deranged" tips for not only throwing a nice party but for living glamorously, and who doesn't want to do that? Not you, really? Well, try it before you judge it.

This initial interest led to collecting said books which now take up a special shelf in her library. At first my soul sister Jancee Dunn would kick off her parties by actually reading aloud the stranger bits to the laughter of the crowd. But I think she started to get something more out of them and stopped making so much fun of these helpful friends.

When I was a kid on the bald open prairie (we at home rarely said "prairie" without the "bald open") I craved a life less dusty. A life that maybe had more people in it, and people who did things other than talk about the weather which is, to be fair, a live or die element of life on the B.O.P. Somehow or other I got my hands on an old home economics text book which was probably in a box picked up at an auction as I cannot imagine anyone picking such a book out for me in a second hand book store. Anyway none of that matters, what matters is the book was a fascination for me. It talked about how to BE in the world, how to dress and speak and how to keep hairbrushes "fresh" and things like that. Can you imagine anything so intoxicating to a pre-adolescent freaked out by the judgement of the world? Never mind that the info was even then already two decades out of date.

This sort of "ideas for living" book is now a constant favorite though books of this nature are hard to find. Yes we have Martha but she's sort of, I don't know, stern and what we want is something a bit more celebrating. Jancee sums it up nicely: "...the more I read these cheery books, the more I discovered that what I loved about them was their offbeat joie de vivre, their plucky contention that with wit, verve and maraschino cherries, anybody can live a fabulous life."

That's sort of a nice idea on a rainy day, isn't it?

My own book list includes Elegance by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux who contends that god may not have made you beautiful but anyone can be elegant with the right gentle direction. The book speaks of women of the past who seem to have changed clothes about five times a day (morning dresses? what that?) but what the book really says to me is be respectful of your very own self. Then there is Entre Nous, A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl which is similar in intent. A French girl thinks before she speaks, guards her privacy carefully, chooses intellectual pursuits over the giddy charms of giddy charms. Very encouraging advice for a woman who feels like the trick pony at parties. Even The Bombshell Manual of Style, written in 2001 so a relative newcomer to the genre, has its place in that it encourages us to take good care of ourselves and to vet any new friends and boys to test their worthiness before they are allowed into the inner sanctum. That's kind of a fun idea.

Jancee has done even more sleuthing than me and so I am now on the hunt for some of her finds.

"The dictum of these vintage books was always "Be larger than life" -- markedly different from the message of modern-day tastemakers like Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Nate Berkus, who propose the more succinct "Be me." " Doesn't that sum up the current oeuvre? Martha is a dictator, telling me to clean up my room. I hate that.

I like the idea of the old girls' eccentricities (in Sex and the Single Girl, for example, Helen Gurley Brown suggests a brunch cocktail made of boiling down four cups of coffee to one, then adding gin and vanilla ice cream. Madness! But probably makes for an interesting party....) I like the idea of having FUN with life, and if Jancee calls that being larger than life, so be it.

You can't do anything about the weather or the face god gave you. Might as well throw a party.

Books for kids

Back in my day, books written for "YA" or young adults as it is called now, involved sporty girls who got themselves into scrapes. On the young end of the spectrum there was Harriet the Spy (a personal favorite, nosy little writer that she was) and Trixie Beldon and of course dear Nancy Drew (pain in the butt I always thought, bloody prissy princess). Back then, life was harsh but the books were gentle -- Nancy, for example, had no mother (interesting, that) and a lovely dad, she was perfect, poised and pretty, there was some housekeeper or other around, and her friends fell into two cardboard camps: there was a tomboy and there was a soft and gentle nice girl named Honey if I recall, who was "pleasantly plump" whatever that means. Once you graduated from these sweet tomes you were onto real books, like The Catcher in the Rye and such before you moved on to Harold Robbins or Henry Miller for instructional purposes.

Lately I've been reading a number of books meant for young people, and what a sea change. It may be trite to say it but it seems to me that LIFE for young people has become gentle and easy (buy me take me show me being their mantra, and their parents snap to attention and buy, take, show) but their books are harsh. It is amazing to me that adult writers can so powerfully depict the pain and angst of childhood and youth. These books are like perfume -- as a scent can immediately transport you back to a time and place, these books artfully remind me of the crushing griefs and embarrassments of a cruel world we barely understand.

What I Was is written by the amazing Meg Rosoff, who also wrote the wonderful How I Live Now. Both describe youth as being its own country, cut off entirely from mysterious adults and their mores.

What I Was speaks of the chaste love affair (of the deep friendship kind, the best kind) between two boys. This friendship is the only softness either knows; the narrator is in British boarding school which we are given to understand is cold in every way and filled with bullies and the ever-dangerous weak, both bent on destruction. It also speaks of the intense passions of that age, and what I had not considered is how transforming they are. And they are. I remember well a great love of my life, my best friend in highschool, who went off me for a reason only she knows. The anxiety and despair this rejection caused can still bring me to my knees when I think about it. It set me up for a million disappointments -- an early lesson, yes, and a painful one.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell also describes a young British schoolboy, this one a stammerer who is tormented by Hangman (who gets in the way of the language he wants to use) and Maggot, inner demons both. His parents are each in their way soulless, fighting with each other about something that lurks beneath the surface. Adulthood looks dreadful, the present is fraught with the cruelty of peers and our boy must make his way through minefields of all kinds -- even his own inner spirit works against him, strangling his words.

I have said it many times but still, I don't know how we survive childhood. Few of us survive it intact. It is wonderful to me that writers can turn such experience into wisdom and art.

In a way reading these books is therapeutic. We recognize the slights the protagonist is enduring, we went through them ourselves. We support him, love him, want to protect him. We hate his enemies. The lesson then, is that the wounded soul really did deserve to be cared for, it is so obvious on the page, and this is something we can take into life. Kind of a revelation, that.

The stories you tell yourself.

She is five. Hoping for good news. She is with two people, waiting -- one loves her but she doesn't know it or feel it; she loves the other absolutely and can't know or feel that the love is not reciprocated. The news comes and it is not at all what she hoped for -- the baby is a boy. What this means, for her, a girl, is that she has no sister, no ally, no hope. She is utterly, totally, alone. No one will help her or save her. Or know her, for that matter. It is now all over. Her last chance.

She reacts badly. Shattered, crushed, destroyed. Her eyes are coals, bright and shot with tears, haunted, horrified. Unbelieving. It cannot be true. That the universe can be so cruel and so dead set against her. She is five.

I hate him she says, I hate him already and the aunt says (the treacherous aunt) No you don't. So. It is utterly true. No one sees her, knows her, cares. She is on her own now and now she decides -- she doesn't know she decides, she's just five, but she decides nonetheless -- well, if they all want to hurt me, if there is no one in the universe to love me, I will hurt myself ten times as much. I will exceed their hurt, I will excel past where they would go, I'll show them. She's five. It's five year old logic.

Love in the time of dementia

The story in the NYT's Week in Review begins thusly: "So this, in the end, is what love is."

The story is about love and age, and begins with the example of Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman named to the US supreme court, and her husband who suffers from Alzheimer's. He is in a nursing home and has fallen for someone else, and Sandra is pleased. The O'Connor's son reports that his mom is happy to see her husband of 55 years happy and content, and even visits the new couple, chit-chatting with them as they hold hands on a porch swing.

New love, the story goes on to say, is all about the thrill of it all and wanting to be happy. Old love apparently is about softer things and wanting someone else to be happy.

There is even a claim in the piece that as the brain ages (that means, as we age) we become easier to please, more inclined to see the good over the bad, better able to deal with the vicissitudes of love. Studies guaging reactions to positive and negative scenes indicate that young people react to the negative, middle aged people see a balance and the elderly respond only to the positive. As people get older, therefore, they seem to naturally see the world in a more positive light.

Oh my, there is so much to say about all this.

First of all, where are these studies and what lobotomized old people did they find to do them with? I have worked in many a nursing home including those filled with Alzheimer's sufferers and other demented souls and I can tell you, the elderly are often deeply crabby to the point of pure evil. It may be sunny and lovely outside and everyone may be perfectly pleasant but by god, you should have understood that the mushy squash goes on the LEFT side of the plate.

The O'Connor "love" story strikes me in a few ways as well, and few are positive. First of all, and this is an idee fixe of mine, it is definitely a man's world. Here we have a demented old man in a nursing home and he can still find a date. There is no mention of the brilliant, talented and accomplished Sandra having same; in my own case we have an imperfectly sane bombshell sitting at home alone on a Saturday night. Ms O'Connor, WHERE is the justice in all this? This story strikes me as being painfully close to that of Stephen Hawking's sorry love life -- wherein we have a man who is virtually helpless and has had to depend on his good wife for absolutely everything including the messy bits having to do with bottoms; he is a man who is undoubtedly weird, certainly weird to talk to with that manufactured computer voice and all, and yet he still is able to run off (though "run" may not be the word) with the nanny, his own nanny but nevertheless. He may be twisted to gnome proportions and impossible to understand but by god and by gar, he still has romantic options.

If this sounds like the twisted gnomes of the world don't deserve love, forgive me. Of course that is not what I mean. It is that no matter what, MEN are still considered sexy and attractive, a "catch", long past the point where a woman is. Why can't the world love an adventurous woman is it does and adventurous man?

In my next life, please let me be a man. And if yes, may I not be born into the time of Amazons? I want just once to feel what it's like to be a winner.

What the studies and the article seem to suggest is that as we grow older we grow wearier of the fight for that elusive happiness of being loved absolutely by someone we love absolutely. We grow accustomed to compromise, to infidelity, to the let-down -- a crumb is okay, at least it's something.

Perhaps this beats abject heartbreak at 80. Heartbreak today nearly kills me, I don't know if I could withstand such a thing with a frailer heart than the one I have now. Perhaps this general giving in is simply biology -- the body's desire to survive where the heart and mind would not.

Shutter Island

I love a good shimmy-shammy, in books if not in life. Others might call this the "surprise ending".

Asylum by Patrick McGrath is a terrific example of this type, and even Incredibly Close has a bit of a twist; in movies it's as famous as The Sixth Sense though even better versions include Lilith or Bunny Lake is Missing. Playing a trick on a dear reader is a noble tradition in mysteries spawned by Agatha Christie but it's really best when it is more psychological that that. What do you know, and how do you know you know it?

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane is such a "hey wait a minute" story. Lehane elevated himself above the average one-a-year mystery writer with Mystic River, a truly complex story of not knowing what you know and the madness caused by pain and injustice. Shutter Island predates that book and contains elements of its consideration of how much grief the human mind can tolerate.

To say much more would give away the surprise. If you have a rainy Saturday afternoon to yourself, spend it on Shutter Island.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

There is a character in current literature that always haunts me long after the last word is read. He is a small boy, smart beyond smartypants, an outsider, solid within himself but vulnerable to the taunts and torments of other children, he is a brave little soul striving to be his own man in a world that mocks him.

He was the literal, solid, inadvertently hilarious son of a single mom in About a Boy; he was the brave autistic soul trying to figure it all out in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and he is Oskar Schell, the absurdly clever and so deeply wounded boy in Extremely Loud.

Oskar loves his dad and his dad loves him. In fact, Oskar is lucky enough to have that parent and friend who truly SEES him and loves him, who knows and applauds his tiny madnesses and quirks. He has, in other words, what we are all led to believe we deserve -- someone who loves him unconditionally. And then something terrible happens.

It can be a cheap trick to use 9/11 as a plot point, and it's become a bit too easy to throw that in to make a book "relevant". But in this book 9/11 or something just like it is imperative. In fact, the author makes us think about the effect of the devastation in a slightly new way -- one of the hardest parts of the tragedy is Oskar doesn't really know what happened to his dad, how exactly he lost his life and this seems like a hole that can't be filled, as the coffin can't be filled. There was a dad and then there was .... nothing. And, Oskar was sent home from school on that terrible morning, and got home in time to hear the many, many messages his dad left for him. Why didn't his dad say "I love you"? Why didn't Oskar pick up the phone? There is a truth to the human condition when facing what must not be real, and that truth could not be told otherwise.

Oskar's brave struggle to heal his broken heart broke mine. Such a smart little boy, and one trying so hard -- often things that happen in his day give him "heavy boots" but sometimes, luckily, he feels like "one hundred dollars." He has a grandmother who loves him utterly, and a mom who protects him like a guardian angel, silently and unseen; he lives in a cocoon of caring but it doesn't matter. See, his heart is broken and he needs to walk through that country until he finds a new state of being.

I don't know why this sort of boy means so much to me. I remember once having lunch at school in the very small and harsh town we lived in briefly. Among us that day were a few of the rawboned, extra-large farm boys who were probably a bit too old to be in Grade 8, which I was at the time, and one in particular was singled out for ridicule. He was a boy who didn't say much and why would he, and he ate his lunch silently ignoring the rest of us including the other boys who were teasing and throwing things and being obnoxious as boys are bound to be at that age and always....he opened his thermos and poured out a cup of chocolate milk. It was not fancy store-bought chocolate milk but something homemade and kind of grainy looking, and this made the other boys howl with laughter. They made such fun of him and his poverty, and he resolutely turned deaf. I couldn't bear it then and remember the scene with pain often -- someone loved him and wanted to soften his day a little, and that small gesture turned into yet another means to hurt him. Oskar's little quirks so lauded by his dad -- maybe his inventions or jewellery or the business card he made for himself -- made him the object of fun among those who loved him not at all. Never think childhood is innocent. Its casual cruelty would kill us all, which is why we become adults.

What We Talked About

I have just spent a few meaningful hours in the company of Anthony Robbins -- there were a few hundred (thousand?) others but he was talking to me, me, me.

Oh my god I love this man. First of all, he is HUGE in every respect -- huge personality, huge head, teeth, hands like plates. But mostly, he is a huge presence and you could call him god-like except for his profane and totally guy-next-door way of speaking. It's great, really -- god made man.

What's brilliant about Tony, and I feel I can call him that, is that he was SO far ahead of the curve, a huge wave currently flowing through psychology, books, self-help. First of all, he was the original coach, back when we didn't have coaches for everything from potty training to career building, when coaches were the gruff guys on the field. Now it's an industry and an industry created by my good friend Tony.

But more than that, he was onto something WAY before even the shrinkiest shrinks cottoned on. He recognized that if you start to think differently, you THINK DIFFERENTLY -- that changing your mind changes your mind. Oh I know this sounds like one of those zen riddles that mean nothing (what animal walks on four legs then two then three etc etc) but it is true. There is a movement today in plasticity, psychiatrists and neurologists coming together to really understand that the brain and the mind are one, and that changes in thinking can change the chemistry and the physical nature of the brain itself. Which in turn changes psychology. And so on and so on. Tony caught on to that idea early. He also recognized that we are physical beings, and that our physiology - the very way we move - changes the way we see the world.

Tons of books have been spawned via his thinking. The Success Principles by that chicken soup guy Jack Canfield or Canned Field. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. O Magazine. Tons of stuff.

Oh my, I do love my Tony.

He is so right. Stand up, jump, shout YES! and then how do you feel? My heavens, you FEEL BETTER!

But there is more. He stands for the proposition that you live your life, it doesn't live you; that you have the power to change, that pain is a sign of a misalignment between what your blueprint of life is and your actual life, or a misalignment between your STATE of mind, or your STATE as Tony calls it, and where you need to be.

He has some good mantras but that's not all he's about -- though lots of pretenders to his throne might be only mantrasities. For example, in life "I hope this works out" is not a decision. It's a preference. So, not powerful enough to qualify for what you need to do to live the best life you can. Or, how's this one: "Your STATE of mind when you learn affects what you learn." Think about that for a moment. Or this: When in pain, you have three choices (and only three): Blame. Change your life conditions. Or, change the blueprint of what you wanted out of life.

It is utterly simple. It is utterly human. It is utterly correct. It only looks simple and obvious because he's been able to articulate it so clearly.

My Tony has changed my life. Watch me go.

A Fatal Inversion - more

Guilt is an insidious, corrosive thing. I once knew a therapist who had two mantras: suffering is optional and guilt is unnecessary. Except it isn't, most of the time -- guilt and the desire not to feel it is what keeps most of us more or less moral. In other words, it is what passes for conscience.

Donna Tartt's wonderful The Secret History looked at what happens to people when they do in fact get away with murder. The result isn't pretty -- each of the students of the swish college who was part of the killing of Bunny went awry in some way. It is a kind of judeo-christian view of things, isn't it? Because what the theme suggests is that we know when we've done wrong, we expect to be punished for it and sliding by upsets the natural order of things.

Interestingly, A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) has a similar theme. In her version, though, it's not so much getting away with murder that's the problem, it's not knowing how long you are going to get away with it, and that's the trick when doing bad things. It's a ticking time bomb and sooner or later, someone's going to blow it for you.

The characters in Inversion are all thieves -- one steals the mansion from his father when he could as easily share it; another steals for the sake of it; a third steals the oxygen out of the room through her utter dullness, yet another steals whatever he can, be it a heart or a soul or his wife's time. At one point a baby is stolen, and dies and then murder is committed to cover up this sorry fact. The only one who seems to get away with it in any real sense is the most mad of the characters, who somehow seems to come into her own after the deed is done.

But for the nutter, the fragile psyche who stole a baby out of some post-partum fit of madness, each of the characters then goes on to live an abbreviated life, a quashed life. The energy it takes to keep the lid on things, to prevent any loved one from opening it, to stay hidden, ultimately kills the soul in all of them. So, no one actually gets away with murder. Not the dead, and not the living. To paraphrase a well-known convict, in murder "everybody dies." And in keeping secrets, partaking in the shimmy-shamy, the flim-flam, the cover up, the endless compromises of keeping lies hidden, in living the half-life of feeling guilty -- well, in that case, everybody dies as well.

A Fatal Inversion

Does anyone do "creepy" as well as British writers? They invented the murder mystery, right? Even tea-sipping spinsters are in on it. In fact, when you think about it, doesn't "Creepy Macabre" sound like someone you wouldn't want to meet at boarding school?

Am knee deep in A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell posing as Barbara Vine (creepily enough, she dedicates this book "with love from Barbara" -- as though this Barbara person were, like, real) and thus far we know a woman and a baby are dead, we know that some sexually active but not perhaps active enough (we have the requisite Rendell inhibited character here, too) young people are spending stolen time in a glorious country house one of them has inherited but can't afford to keep, and we have a sort of Secret History knowledge that yes, the group knows and must keep secret that something sinister and bad (well, murder) occured in the house for some reason yet to be revealed.

There is a beautiful tension to all this, as we wait with bated breath to learn who this poor dead woman is and why she came to such a fate. We know that the inheritor of the country house went on to good things, and the most overtly sexual of the houseguests is a doctor who has taken his interest to the specialty level, being an ob-gyn who is deciding if it is time to move to Highgate from Hamstead. References also to Muswell Hill and other places that are for me shots to the heart which is why we SWORE, vainly, not to read any books set in London or England or the UK.

Be that as it may. Vine/Rendell is wonderful at depicting the shallow soul, propelled by a deviant self-interest, moving inexorably toward a final act of departure, such as murder. Which of these idle young people ends up dead and who the killer? So far any of them could go without much of a loss to humanity; we know the boys are safe from the dead part, though the baby may implicate one in the death.

Cannot wait for nightfall and another dose of Sinister Macabre.

More Cruelty TV

It is entirely possible, and I'm given to believe it is, that Gordon Ramsay is a great chef. Having just watched a jag of Kitchen Nightmares I can hardly believe such a beast was ever called to a nurturing profession. What is more giving than the desire to offer people good food? And who is more bloody-minded and cruel than our Gord?

I watched a segment of a show where our Gord goes into a fairly run of the mill restaurant and orders lunch. He finds the crabcakes, as billed, perfectly good and finds everything else overwrought. No shallots in the shallot-infused sauce over the apparently dry Atlantic salmon, too much garlic in the green beans, a pasty zucchini pancake. A lovely-seeming gentle manager who was THRILLED to have our Gord enter his establishment was eviscerated, the chef and owner called mediocre despite the crabcake, the chef/owner and his wife/partner asked if maybe they shouldn't just shutter the place.

Easy pickin's Gord. Truly.

Not only that, as a study in character, doesn't it take a particular and not necessarily honorable personality to be able to so easily be cruel to people who are inclined to admire and respect you? Did they ask to be COMPARED to you? only in the most oblique way. And yet our Gord tears a strip off them for not being .... more Gord.

It is interesting to me that some professions are called to answer for their sins right off the bat and others can slide along merrily, mailing in mediocrity whenever they want, and they seem to want to a lot. But a restaurant is reviewed, criticized, judged in its first week and as per biblical prophecy, so it shall be written, so it shall be done. Nail it and you're great, miss and you're dead no matter what. Lawyers can win or lose and that's expected, they aren't actually publicly judged for their prowess with the point; teachers can slide for years and still deserve a huge pension; even reporters who are ostensibly judged by their word every day can last a long time before someone says hey, you missed every scoop ever offered by a dumptruck.

Now, to be honest, I feel it is better value to eat a vastly expensive but amazing meal than to consume calories at a fraction of the price. Most days I'd rather go hungry than eat something poor. But a restaurant is merely a business like any other and each finds its level -- there are a lot of people who think Buffalo wings are the height of great cuisine. Frankly, some days, in some conditions, so do I. For many people food is food.

So why is it interesting to us that a horrible man but great chef should find a modest restaurant modest? The poor bastards didn't claim to be more. Is "constructive criticism" ever constructive? and to what psychopath? I cannot bear TV's current interest in showing the falling face, the brave front, the batted-back tears. Fine if it's about exposing the church to its sins or a government agency to its failings. But these are honest people trying to earn an honest buck. If Gord could find similar fault at a peer's restaurant, go for it. But this exercise in nastiness seems utterly gratuitous. And, I don't think there's a higher purpose such as teaching America to eat better. America, for the most part, and willingly, merely wants to eat.

No, this is "great television" and it sucks.

Getting back to the fraction of the whole

I suspect this book is what is known as a "romp." It is wry, funny, ridiculous and yet hits at many truths despite its Alice Through the Looking Glass aspects.

The biggest truth is, of course, the truth about weakness and I will hammer away at this so all bored by it should leave now. See, weak people are destructive people. They want to avoid responsibility and certainly cannot bear to actively hurt anyone but man o man, what havoc they end up being responsible for. In this book, Martin is the weakest of the weak and he manages to burn down a town, send his brother into a life of crime, blind a man, break a few hearts, send a woman to her death. All for wishy washing around.

Yet sins of the fathers are not necessarily borne by the sons. Martin's son Jasper shows some strength of character in spite of himself, even though at one point he is shamed to admit that his one passionate decision is to murder someone. Well, it's that kind of book, it kind of works at a certain pitch.

The book is nicely cynical, too. In one instance the players are admiring a sunset, a vivid and extravagantly coloured spectacle made so by smog -- an instance where man's doing surpasses God's.

Ostensibly this is an amusing tale of family and character. Family. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.

Well, in THIS family, maybe you can.......

A room of one's own.

Misery loves company. Does it? Actually, no, I don't think so, I think misery loves solitude and the comforts of hiding under a pile of coats. As well, I have never approved of the "it could be worse" school of thought. What is that, something to look forward to? That even in grief you are outdone by others?


Of late, and at the behest of someone looking out for my improved psyche, I have been reading books on the subject of surviving childhood. Many quirks of personality it seems are actually old, fossilized habits learned long ago to offset the power and control of those who looked after us. Lots of the characteristics of those around us are also based on these primal fears and deprivations -- how anyone survives childhood is a central mystery and we should all try our best to be reincarnated as beloved cats. Hell is other people? Hell is being people.


We may survive the past but do we thrive, and what changes are indelibly wrought by the baroque cruelties suffered? Here's the thing. I don't adhere to the idea that to be an artist one must suffer, but suffering does sometimes lead to beauty. Think of natural wonders of the world -- it's the stress that creates the diamond. And here we come to Henry Darger.


A friend sent me the images here, and suggests this book is incredible. Why? Here is what she says: "Incredibly interesting (albeit sadder than sad), self taught artist/writer, a recluse, a janitor. These photos reveal the tone of his environment in a very intimate and quiet way. Here's the photo that inspired him to begin his writings."

She goes on to say "I like this excerpt from the guardian: Why is Darger so popular? Many would argue that it's because his art is truly different and truly beautiful. That may be so. What is certain is he led a life of such suffering, neglect and isolation that he makes Vincent van Gogh look like a party-going fat cat."


You want to come back as a cat. Trust me.

A Fraction of the Whole

The weak shall inherit the earth the slidey bastards and you want to know why? Because they don't care about anything but their own weakness and so they can crash, burn, wreck and ruin like nobody's business. They really are terrible to have around.

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz spells all this out very succinctly. We have Martin our fifth-business who instigates all sorts of things in his slidey weak way. Like what? Like getting his brother not just into trouble but into crime because HE, Martin, didn't want to get beat up in a schoolyard fight.

How so you ask? Pretty easy when you're a weak bastard. Martin was in trouble with the bullies and so told his avid little brother, a terrific sportsman, a phenomenal athlete, that the bullies were CHEATERS. Well. Gasoline to a bonfire. The little brother goes on to beat up the bullies and the bullies stab him in the leg, ending his sports career. Then they tell him that so long as he joins their lives of crime they won't kill Martin (big loss if you ask me but I'm not the little brother in this one.) The brother, Terry, takes to crime like fish to algae and goes on cleaning the world of cheaters.

Terry, you see, believes in something. Martin not so much. So he goes on wreaking havoc by trying to slide out of things left right and centre.

The Martin story is very funny and I'd tell you more but I'm not finished yet. But it's pretty clear, weak wins. Well, maybe the weak don't WIN but they don't seem to get hurt or roughed up much either so we might as well call it winning.

Jekyll & Hyde

It's good to have friends who read, because they do a lot of the legwork for you. One good friend and terrific reader recently told me he had read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the first time, in fact read Robert Louis Stevenson for the first time, while on vacation in Jamaica and was so mesmerized by it and so enchanted by the good writing he's now on to (what may have been more appropos in the first place) Treasure Island.

Now, it is not many who would take a misty and dark gothic horror to the beach. Yet fewer would be riveted while the sun plays on the waves and screaming children make sand castles but there you have it. But he spoke so highly this book has been on my list ever since. He once said to me, when I was complaining about how hard it is to find a really good book among any season's new releases, "Why do you waste your energy when there is so much that is tried, true and has passed the test of time?" He sent me on the path of Iris Murdoch, splendidly prolific and a rich vein should you like her work. Sigh. Back to Sue Grafton.

As I am still avoiding any book with anything to do with love (why o why is every damn book about love? honestly, as a culture we are obsessed with love. Why when there's so many of us are people still alone??) I took J&H with me to the country house where I do my best reading. It is back to school time at my local bookstore and there were piles of "classics" on the first table you trip on, prominent among them being this one and it seemed sort of a sign from God.

Imagine my distress when I opened the book and discovered that it is one among SIX "books" in a rather narrow tome.

I asked Kristin, a publisher and whose house I was in, if this could possibly be right. Is Jekyll and Hyde a SHORT STORY??

"I have no idea I've never read Stevenson. Or Dickens. Let me look at the book," she said, helpfully. She read the copyright page and a few others that tell things to publishers and handed it back. "Ask Tom."

Now, Tom has been in publishing since Christ was a cowboy and all Kristin and Tom's homes are made tinier for being lined with every book ever published in this fair land. Even the bad ones. Of which there are, sadly, many. You'd think he'd know about so commonplace a "classic."

"I have no idea. Ask Rebecca," he said. Rebecca is sixteen and had no interest in this exchange, as she was deeply immersed in Blindness, a book I have never been able to make head nor tail of. I think it's about a bunch of people who go blind for some reason.

I was loathe to read a book that might be a fake, to spend the time on the wrong thing but plunged ahead anyway. My Reader had said the fascinating thing is Hyde (the scary one) freaks people out, they feel immediately cold and unsafe in his presence but there is virtually no description of what he looks like, he is faceless and amorphous.

In fact no one and nothing is much described in this novella, as I have learned it definitively is. The premise is interesting. Jekyll wants to obliterate his dark side, and so invents a potion that separates him from his monster. Hyde becomes his alter-ego, so that he is all good, the other is all bad. The problem is, as time goes on it is harder and harder to revert back to Jekyll, it takes more potion and more energy and more time until eventually Hyde is the ego, and Jekyll all but disappears.

Stunning to me is the psychological relevance of this -- and this, before Freud had committed a word to paper. Try to supress that which is negative and it will grow and destroy you. It will BECOME you. What you fear becoming is what you will be, if you cannot integrate and synthesize the pain of it. Think of what ensues with those who supress sexuality, or those who want to be seen as ONLY sweet-natured and then turn passive-aggressive and truly horrible. Interesting that this and other stories came out in the suppressive Victorian era. The artists were clear about the destruction they saw, and no one heard a word.

I liked also that the bad part could be hived off with a potion -- hello cocktail hour.

Fascinating really, essential reading for Psych 101.

Smart guy, this Stevenson.

My Life.....In France

I had lunch today with someone I have known for years, but who would not have become such a friend were it not for the fact that two years ago she was dying. Or, if not precisely dying, fighting for her life against a cancer she seems cured of. That she was ill gave her time and a timorousness that allowed me in -- prior to that she was a hard driving, ambitious, fabulously successful ad executive living a life I could barely imagine, and her life didn't allow for the likes of me. She was on a fast track and I was busy picking daisies. Or something.

In fairness her cancer was merely the biggest of her concerns at a time that tested her strength. Her beloved father died, her daughter fell and broke both arms, she was fired after about a year of abuse from a job she loved and hated. And then she was sick.

As she proceeded through treatment she needed other things to think about and so we worked together on a small project, and I think loved one another's company; we became friends, finally, not merely acquaintances. Because of the grief and pain we were both going through, while our own, we now had very common ground and the kind of wide open space that allows you to say things and admit fears you otherwise would protect both yourself and your listener from. In our case there just didn't seem to be much reason to bother with such niceties. What we were going through was in the book of Life's Hard Lessons, it seemed stupid not to share the wealth.

Today we met at a favorite bistro where we order the EXACT same thing every time, a delicious and simple French lunch with a glass of wine. We caught up. She is healthy, seems completely recovered and is gorgeous and robust again, the papery quality of her skin gone and a bloom in its place, her ginger hair now wildly curly and finally utterly her own. She has eyebrows, eyelashes, energy.

And now comes the rest of her life. I feel I have a second chance now she said. I feel I have been given a special opportunity and I think to myself, is this what my life is? This job, this routine, this? This is all it is?

So change is brewing.

Mid-life crises have been given a bad name, maybe by the disgruntled, content spouses left on the curb and the families perfectly happy with the routine, the job, this. My friend says perhaps if she hadn't gotten sick she wouldn't have noticed the routine or thought there was anything MORE at stake. I'm not so sure. I am also having a mid-life crisis, I prefer the term "awakening", without one drop of chemo or one night's fear of imminent death.

There is a yearning, she said, for more, to follow a dream, to live somehow more creatively. "I want to do something, I just don't know what it is." The question then is, what is your bliss? What are you passionate about? Easier asked than answered! It is so hard in adulthood to dream a dream or unleash from expectations and disappointments and what IS.

I don't know what I love, she said. And then she said "actually, I love food. I would love to eat and drink, how do you make a life about that?"

How indeed.

Which brings me, and I hope her, to My Life in France by Julia Child, a wonderful memoir of Julia's awakening at an age not so much younger than us. Julia followed her husband to Paris and France after the second world war and discovered a love of....food. She and her husband followed this food with an unswerving passion, taking time off from eating only to repair their gall bladders. If there was a dish reputed to be excellent at a small restaurant on a cow path in southern France, they went. If there was something rarely concocted but would be concocted this once, at this cost, they saved and they savoured. The result of this passion as we all know now is Mastering the Art of French Cooking (which took YEARS to create) and the first ever cooking show on newfangled TV -- this spawned a massive industry.

Julia's unadulterated love for food and all things French is refreshing, as is her candour which I suspect is unbeknownst to her. She stole that cookbook out from under a French woman's nose, it would seem her beloved husband might be a touch...exuberant as my boss would say, gay as the rest of us might. He was also a bit of an underachiever shall we say, and perhaps an artist only in her eyes. They were an eccentric couple of bachelors, really, but all of that is by the by. The wonderful thing is the boundless enthusiasm she feels for this amazing discovery: Food is meant to be a pleasure, it is not merely fuel, something that hadn't dawned on her Yankee self until she found herself in Europe.

Passion and enthusiasm are always not merely attractive but compelling. Finding passion, what we love, what part of life gives us the most pleasure, is what God meant us to seek.

What We're Not Reading, take two

This is so commonplace now that I hesitate to bring attention to it but earlier this month as I was paging through the New York Times I came across a story, rather small, on an inside page, about an Army private sentenced to 110 years for the rape of the Iraqi girl and the killing of her and her family.

Perhaps this story didn't need to played any larger -- after all, this is not the first soldier involved in the incident to be sentenced. It's not the first time that the story has been reported. Still, it is an unusually high sentence for such a crime, a remarkable sentence really. And for whatever reason, while this story is well known it has never, to me, grabbed the attention it deserves. That the soldiers involved are facing such penalties has not received the attention this deserves -- usually there is something of a pass given to soldiers who lose it, their penalties have never, to me anyway, seemed large enough.

As it happens I was at dinner with an old friend, a sound engineer (is this what they are called??) who had that very day finished the last touches on a new Brian de Palma film -- a remarkable feat, shot and completed within four months. The subject? The rape and murder of the Iraqi girl and the murder of her family. The movie, she says, is harrowing and a return for de Palma to his days as a maverick. It is shot as though by news cameras, security, rogue grabs on videocam -- raw, real, unrepentent.

The movie is receiving positive buzz so far but is deeply disturbing and I cannot imagine what it was like for her to lay down the sound. I remember well the trial of serial rapist and serial killer Paul Bernardo -- no one but the jury was allowed to see the actual video he and his wife took of their rape and torture of two young girls but the sound of the thrill, the barely contained joy, in his voice and the keening of the girls torments me still.

My friend said she feels the movie makes us complicit in the crime but I disagree. It forces us to look at it, to understand who to hate and how much. This is the important new role of communicators other than media. This child was raped while her family was trapped in another room, unable to help her but able to hear what was happening as soldiers one by one attacked her, as other soldiers held her down. Her family was killed before she was, and then she was shot in the head. In my experience in covering crime I would say this was the soldier's only mercy -- one of the cop reporters I knew used to say rape victims are the same as murder victims, they're just not dead yet. Afterward, her small body was set on fire. It is terrible to read these words, worse yet to witness the acts even as a fictionalized account and yet all this happened. It happened on our account, as an outcome of the "war on terror". I don't feel I've been able to read nearly enough about these events despite what some might call a "media saturation"; that the longest sentence in memory was doled out a few weeks ago and that the story didn't warrant better play is a shame. Therefore I think it is honorable that de Palma saw fit to document this atrocity, and it is probably a duty of ours to witness it. It's a shame we will need to go to a cinema and pay for the privilege when it all should have been on the news, but that's the way it is. The Canadian Broadcasting Company once saw fit to call television "the fifth estate" and I would suggest that the fourth, media, typically newspapers, are no longer any estate at all. We are lucky there are always storytellers, though, ready to take up the cause.

Pictures are a thousand words

Reading is all very well but sometimes the best thing in the world is to look at pictures, like a child, imagining a life behind the image.

To this end I spend an inordinate amount of time on The Sartorialist, a delicious blog about style. Sart simply goes off into the world and photographs people who look intertesting to him, and his egalitarian and kind disposition to what makes a great picture and good style is refreshing and rare in the fashion world. Not only that, he's a lovely writer so if you do find yourself craving the written word, it's occasionally there for you. He captures all kinds of people including those with the etched faces and demeanors of people who would be shocked to be considered "fashionable", appearing to be far busier simply living or thinking or working hard or suffering or enjoying, un-self-consciously.

I am excited to the point of not sleeping, too, to know that the September Vogue, Bazaar, the European editions, Harper's Bazaar and various style sections will soon drop on the doorstep. I love fall -- the time of re-invention. The real beginning of the year.

The Book of Tells

Boys are trouble.
Thorny (I said THorny) friendships, sticky (in the sense of tricky, not in the sense of commitment god forbid) relationships, torment -- these are my special skills. I guess I like the tumult, or am a sucker for pain, or enjoy the tangle.
Or maybe it's just a habit.
There a few books that should be required reading for people like us, and the one I am liking best is The Mind that Changes Itself because it has nothing whatsoever to do with "self help" but rather is a beautifully and kindly written explanation of a frontier of brain science that suggests our "brains" are actually our "minds" -- and that patterns of thought become entrenched in the moorings and make-up of the brain as an organ in the same way muscle memory becomes nature to an athlete. We just get used to thinking in certain patterns and the very good news is, we can unlearn these patterns pretty easily. How encouraging!
Now, if I really took this book to heart I wouldn't be reading the other stuff I am, but I am....I find myself re-reading emails I've collected in a file called "Walter". This is not his name, and I didn't create this file but it was on my computer from the last user and so it now houses the correspondence of my ex-love and me, and is as close as I may come to the testament and truth of what was between us. I find reading it useful to reassure myself that I am not crazy, that those sentiments really were as real as black and white. Or flashing pixels. That the sentiment was shared, at least briefly.
I wonder if this will now replace "letters", the way we know of artists and writers and thinkers of the past. If stupid mis-typed and poorly spelled jokes or the quotidien details -- "Went for a run and then ate some porridge, yum!" will become the means by which we come to know the inner workings of minds great and not so.
It is certainly a torture to re-read these things. While there is "I love you" and then the less incriminating "love you" and plenty of "I miss you" and "You were on my shoulder all day today" there is also....the absence. Gaps we didn't see the first time. We read email with a certain framework, through eyes that belong to a mind that is convinced of something. It is not the same as something written down on paper -- though the look of the printed word is similar (how were we to know that of ALL the dumb classes we took in highschool, the one one we really needed was typing??) it is actually and truly less stable. The medium is the message, oh yes the medium really IS the message -- so much is mis-read, misinterpreted, hastily and poorly understood.
On this we will create the knowledge of the temper of our times. On these seemingly ephemeral texts we will base biographies and histories. (We know of course there is NOTHING ephemeral about email, it is most persistent as well as often pernicious.) Probably not a good thing. It isn't even a good way to understand the workings of our own hearts, and the hearts of those we thought we knew.

What We're Not Reading

A good friend of mine loves a thriller, now that she's later in life and some of the other thrill is gone. We were speaking of The Unknown Terrorist which she has not read and which I was trying to describe. The thing about this book is its apparent theory that terror turns us primal, less human, and thus the thing we are trying to protect, this Life and Society and Democracy and so on becomes that much less worthy of protection. She said, and she may be right, "I don't know why we think 9/11 is so remarkable. Where we are wrong is in thinking that They want what we have. They despise what we have."
She went on to tell me of a woman she knows who has had no other career but marriage and who now lives off the avails of divorce, alone in a mansion of more than 8,000 sq.ft. This same woman has other homes and cars and the things we collect because we are us and strong and free and because we can. When you think about it, this is obscene.
And so my friend, who lives in Florida most of the year but who is not American, nor Canadian, nor Jamaican really nor British though she sounds it, this friend who is a child of the universe who has a right to be said "the problem is the media."
It inflames me, always, when The Media is blamed for Whatever It Is, and in fact The Media takes a hard knock in The Unknown Terrorist.
But my friend is of the media and said the issue is that there is no longer anything we know as news available to most of the population. What passes for news in the place where she lives most of the year, a small town in hellish Florida, is local and only local, who said what to whom and who may have stolen the boy scouts' pocket money...what happens in the World is never reported nor considered and the only "world vision" available in this small town might be Fox or a talk show or Judge Judy.
Now, this is worth considering.
I have many friends who would consider themselves intellectuals or artists or both and who take it as a badge of honour that they don't read newspapers; many of them are still adhering to that dated fashion of Irony and so boast that they know Gawker best, or The Superficial, or Defamer, all of which have done us the favour of being literal as to their content.
When one of my styley friends said to me long ago, when I was still a newspaper reporter, that she never read the paper I took her to task. We live in a democracy and so it is our civil DUTY to now the news however we learn it, in paper or online, to let Them know we're watching, to pay attention. This is why media is the fourth pillar. This is why there is something like a right to photograph Lindsay Lohan after a bad night.
It's been a long time since I've raised this argument but it seems germaine just now. Pay attention. Yeats said the world falls apart when "the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity." Interesting that he could not have foreseen that lacking conviction could go even further, toward a concerted effort to not merely lack conviction but lack even the interest to know what might be worth being convinced about.
If a bomb drops in the woods and no one hears it, did Lindsay Lohan go to rehab for another round?

The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan

Let's say you set yourself up thusly: ice cold beer, hot summer day, an apparently well-reviewed thriller in your hands and let's say you embark on what you think is a jaunty summer's read.

And what if what you were reading were far closer to literature, far darker and more tragic than even the bloodiest thriller could ever be.

The Unknown Terrorist is a frustrating book if you dislike chase movies and The Fugitive and misunderstandings that could be easily cleared up if someone just SAID something and Kafka. I dislike all those things and so found this a wearing story. And this is what the story is about: Set in Australia, a stripper named the Doll happens to have incredible sex with a swarthy guy she's met at something along the lines of a Pride parade....coincidentally this same swarthy guy saved her best friend's kid from a riptide the day before. She wakes up the morning after this incredible sex and he's vanished and within moments it turns out he is a suspected terrorist and now so is she, as her image has been caught in the security camera of his antiseptic building. On the run she goes.

And then the political and philosophical intention of the book kicks in. She is thought to be a terrorist and all media and police and whatever they call homeland security are freaking out because my good heavens, a terrorist is loose in our beloved city. The venom and vitriol spew. We must protect the beauty and sanctity of our culture, our freedom!! and what is revealed is the repulsive thing we seek to protect, and how ridiculously fundamentalist we have become in our belief what our way is the only way.

I have always wondered what the boys who went to war in the first and second world ones thought they were fighting for. We know now of course, and what a noble cause it was. But the other side also went to war and thought they were fighting for something. What if this time what WE are protecting is the terrible and unworthy thing?

Here is a quote from the book, to give you a sense of its heft:
"Politics places a man at the centre of life, and in permanent opposition to the universe. Love, to the contrary, fills man with the universe......Love is never enough, but it is all we have."

Now, what could this possibly mean? I take it to mean, among other things, that the will to SURVIVE, to live, is a crass impulse. When in survival mode we are unthinking, unbelieving, unrefined. It is the worst of us, it is where the animal lives.

I am that reader who reads every word of a book, from the copyright page on through to the very end where the author is said to live in X with his X and X children. Some of the best words of this book lie in these pages. Flanagan says "Though art is mostly theft, larceny is no guarantee of worth. Whatever resonance this tale possesses, if any, it must be rightfully attributed to those men and women who have created our own times. As Shakespeare -- who rarely invented his own plots ...wrote in Henry IV, Part I: "Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it" -- a most beautiful line lifted from Proverbs. "

The meaning of this book is simply that. It is hardly a fiction. It is being created now, every day. As Flanagan says in these last pages you might miss, "I took this novel from everywhere -- ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks -- no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better."

It's quite a book in the final analysis.

So, my friends, read it and weep.

The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

I find incompetence deeply irritating. I don't think those who can't work a cellphone are charming; those with no sense of direction are a burden; I am not amused, ever, by anyone who tends to eat a few times a day and claims ineptitude in the kitchen -- everyone can boil something up, or anyone who doesn't feel like doing that can order in, it's not that hard. Not WANTING to cook is quite another thing, as is hoping someone else will work out the boring stuff. Good on you if you can find someone to do your dirty work for you, but please don't cloak it in "I'm so sweet and dopey."

I myself am deeply incompetent at all the things I find dull, but I don't try to make it into cocktail conversation. I have never balanced a cheque book (preferring to spend until the phone calls start) and have no idea really how to do taxes -- I screw it up and take the hit. I'm no good at domestic chores and can't work a power drill. So, I hire people to do those things and never speak of them.

There is a whole section of literature, if it can be called that, that is all about the cute incompetent. Bridget Jones may have started it, let's blame her. This Slummy Mummy book was excerpted in Vogue and it seemed light and funny so I bought it but sadly it is as tedious as Bridget except I have fewer things to relate to. I understand fully that the responsibility of looking after myself is as much work as I'm prepared not to do well and I already know the alphabet so I thought it best not to have kids. This book is about the incompetent mummy who just can't keep it together but adorably so. Poor thing, she's trying to flirt but discovers yesterday's underwear balled up in her jeans; she can't believe another mummy can manage a gorgeous coat without jam or egg stuck to it; she never gets out and her life is a pile of unfinished laundry. I can't stand her.

Why oh why is the ruling female in current fiction this dopey hapless woman with bad hair? (and if you doubt me let me reassure you: She ALWAYS has bad hair, the wrong outfit on, sends emails to the entire company, needs to lose weight/stop drinking/stop smoking/stop fantasizing, she needs a system. She is always a mess and the day Mr. Right walks through the door she's in sweatpants and the door falls off. Yet it all works out in the end. )

I once knew a woman who was either the first woman ever to be made partner at her law firm, or was the first woman ever in Germany to be made partner. Either way a glorious example of what to do right. When she had her baby she told me she often went to work with pablum stains on her Lagerfeld. "Well, that's it, that's my job and that's my son," she said with total confidence and she OWNED it -- she was a mother and a lawyer and the pablum stains were a badge of honour in a good way. She was not intending to be cut a break as a hapless cutey.

I am so very tired of this Bridget-type character. I don't actually relate to her. I don't want to relate to her. Please writers everywhere, let her go away and learn how to cook.

Mister Pip

Many years ago, after a great love walked out without adequate reason or explanation (to my way of thinking anyway) I decided that's it. I'm done. I'm out. As of today I will be Miss Havisham and I give up on the whole bloody thing - relationships, men, love and all that comes and goes with it.

I realized every time I tried to be conventional, convention blew up in my face. So, my life would be about other things -- the pursuit of beauty, art, intelligence, words, and would NOT be about the pursuit of a happy husband, three kids and a dog. Over time I have become comfortable and relieved about this.

But my mantra was always I am Miss Havisham -- thing is, I had no idea who she is and so I read, or started to read, Great Expectations. I stopped calling myself Havisham.

A few days ago I ran into an old friend and former colleague who has never steered me wrong with books. She is an expert and books are her profession but more than that she has a delight in fiction that matches my own, and she has the ways and means to savour the best the current publishing season has to offer.

Judith recommended two books, Mister Pip being one. It isn't available for sale yet but by begging shamelessly I received an advance reading copy and devoured this book yesterday.

Great Expectations begins with a kind of a poem: "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

Mister Pip begins similarly, with naming, this time: 'Everyone called him Pop Eye."

This is a first novel and few have such big subjects or flights of imagination that this one does. Mister Pip is the story of a story and the grip of storytelling, the escape of stories, and the fearsome power books, reading, ideas can have. It is set on an island somewhere in the world near Australia and there is some kind of fierce and awful war going on about something or other. Interestingly, there are many books being written and published now that have an amorphous and cruel war as a background -- How I Live Now being one -- a war as seen and experienced on the ground. That is, with no explanations, as something felt but not understood. It reminds me of trying to understand a painting by looking at it up close -- you can see that it is a painting but nothing else is known.

The fathers, older boys and most men have been swept into whatever the battle is, leaving the women, children and Mr. Watts, also known as Pop Eye. There is nothing to do, the teachers are all gone and so Mr. Watts decides to re-open the school and to teach the children whatever he can. His biggest lesson is the story of Great Expectations, "the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens." He reads a chapter a day and Matilda, who is the teller of this story of a story, falls into the spell of Pip and his world, and it becomes as real to her as the mysterious world in which she really lives.

"What I am about to tell results, I think, from our ignorance of the outside world. My mum knew only what the last minister had told her in sermons and conversations....she had heard that man had been to the moon but was inclined not to believe such stories. She did not like boastfulness. She liked even less the thought that she might have been caught out, or made a fool of...."

And therein is the crux of this delicious book -- the mothers of the schoolchildren are afraid of what they are learning, and begin to loathe the man who is, they fear, taking their children from them by having those children inhabit a very different world than the one they live in: a world of ideas and imagination rather than what IS. But over time the mums start to come to the school and start to teach what they know for sure -- the meaning of blue, for example, or how to watch a crab to know the weather. They also start to fall into the power of new ideas.

Matilda comes to know Pip to be as real as any other person she knows, and she puzzles over his decisions. Puzzles over why he would leave his birthplace and call himself Handel -- but a name becomes the truth of a thing, the identity of a thing. She puzzles over why Pip continues to love Estella -- and learns that we sometimes love imperfect things, and love things we cannot have. Through the book she learns the world.

Ideas both create and destroy. When the "rambos" come to the village looking for this Pip character, Mr. Watts is killed; Matilda's life is saved by an idea that gives her hope, strength and courage.

Later Matilda learns she may not have been so different from her mum, having to rely on what she is told rather than what she can learn for herself. When she finally has a copy of Great Expectations in her hands she realizes that she wasn't being read the text but rather Mr. Watts' version of the text -- the story, in other words, as he knew it. And this is as it is with every book -- we can only know what we know of it, not the truth of it. As with the Christians who, once the printing press made the Bible more widely available, realized that the priests may have been selling them a bill of goods, Matilda's faith is shaken.

Mister Pip is a big, big book told like a fable and fairy story, in a deceptively simple manner. It is a book about the effects of being cut off, as the islanders, or cutting yourself off, as Miss Havisham, and the poignant and destructive results of that. It flip-flops between showing that truth can save your life -- Mr. Watts could simply have said I'm not Pip, he's a character in a book -- and a story can save you, as it did Matilda. It flip-flops between what is "truth" versus "story" at their core -- the mums fear the story but live off many of their own, an idea like "blue" is as tangible as eating. It is also about having the courage to learn and understand things that are painful, the implication being that innocence is perfection but cut off, experience is imperfect. Are we better for knowing rather than not knowing? It is hard to say, really. But knowledge draws us as surely as the children were drawn deeply into the story of Pip. Whether we live or die of it -- it being our ability to accept the truth and the power of ideas which often means first facing the fear of being a fool -- depends on whether we are Havisham, Estella or Pip. And I can tell you for certain that you can change your mind about which of those you want to be.

Other Women

As a reader I am lazy. I try hard to read edifying, improving things and yet always fall for a good story like a pretty face.

As a means of learning something while being entertained I read The Other Boleyn Girl -- to be truthful this was inspired not a little bit by a movie starring Scarlett Johansson, who is always a good thing even in a bad film. Being Canadian and therefore taught only the history as seen through the prism of this young and juvenile place -- such a stark country, history as taught in school amounted to who said what in Parliament and the tale didn't improve with the re-telling -- I had never learned a damn thing about England and its romping royals until the days of Chuck and Di.

Henry VIII is more or less the Clinton of his day, known more readily for sexual exploits than any Good Works. What do we really know about Henry and his era except he had a thing for women, had a number of wives (I thought eight but the number is slightly lower) whom he beheaded when he got tired of them (in truth he didn't behead them all but did behead them more often than is truly ideal).

I am always drawn to the story of the underdog, the watcher, the minor character in a major life. These are the observers, the truth tellers, the ones who have the freedom to say, or express, how it really was. The other Boleyn girl was tragic Anne's sister, Henry's first fling.

This is a page-turner, what's known as a "romp", a truly wonderful suntan lotion scented Saturday afternoon read. I swear there are improving aspects to it, too -- for example, it does outline the history of Henry (from the waist down but still) and is a testament to the significance of family and court politics, there is an encouraging tale of Mary, the "Other" and her love of her children and how despite having to lay down for the King she found love, a happy relationship, a nice man within the muck. All good, and it inspires a quest for more knowledge -- at the end of this book Elizabeth I is a dark horse to say the least, so HOW, pray, did she manage to become perhaps the greatest ever ruler of an empire -- and a woman when such were distinctly an underclass. Curiouser and curiouser.

Brimming with confidence I talked to a good friend of mine, very intellectual, who loves and seeks out Jacobean Tragedies (whatever they are) whenever she's in a theatre town like London. I'm not sure when the Jacobean period would be but it sounds long ago and so I mentioned that I'm newly fascinated with the Tudors and dying to read more about how Elizabeth managed to gain the throne, saying that I was on a quest for more learning. Which I thought my friend would appreciate and applaud. Ha. What led to this new interest she asked and when I said it was the wonderful Boleyn Girl book she snorted. Rather rudely if I am honest. "A Harlequin at best."

What a smack-down!

I wonder what she would say of the Josephine B. trilogy I've just devoured. Again, what a wonderful character in history and what a modern approach Jo had to family, love, passion, her children. What a close, knowing, passionate and adult relationship she had with Bonaparte. Talk about in-law trouble! Talk about adultery! (not hers, though she's been smeared in history).

There are so few relationships we see up close. We see our own, though that is akin to trying to understand a mural from an inch away. Forest, trees, a mishmash of hope and desire versus truth. We have seen a marriage from up close through our parents, clearly no experts. So we learn of the myriad ways of love and life through books. Only these can offset cultural and societal expectation of love and happiness and real estate, the essence of what I see of the "relationships" all around me. These historical figures were circumscribed by a set of rules sometimes literally set in stone and yet they lived as moderns -- following their hearts within these confines in a way that looks liberated and liberating to these millennial eyes.

Cruelty TV

This is not about books. It isn't about reading. This is about flipping through channels and seeing something horrifying on TV.
For about a minute I watched American Inventor, a show I've never heard of and I hope you haven't either. I watched a gorgeous, chubby little girl show off a nice picture she'd painted, and I saw I don't know, say five adults tell her she wasn't good enough. I saw this brave little creature fight back tears and then lose that battle, I saw her crushed little face, her shiny happy expression turn to sorrow that surely cannot be erased.
Who came up with this idea? When did utter cruelty to children become entertaining? Why do I read and hear about how violence on TV is bad for kids and walking to school alone is bad for kids and the internet is bad for kids when some beautiful little girl's parents allowed her to be exposed like this and grown ups who should know better sit in judgement of her ideas and her creativity and her very self?
This must be stopped. Is anyone else appalled by this?
I can hardly believe I saw it.
If she were to report that her parents judged her homework so harshly, that someone in her family did said these things her apropos of a pleasant conversation about something she'd created there would be Children's Aid and police and therapy and anguish aplenty.
Please, please please make it stop. This show must be stopped.

Esquire

I love magazines. I adore the fairy tale life as per Vogue, Elle, Bazaar; I love the thinking in the essays of Harpers, The New Yorker, all the usual suspects. I love Paris Vogue for its arty kink, beautiful enough to leave out on the coffee table without making you seem perverse. I don't love the edgy new 'zines that don't seem to have much writing in them, or pictures for that matter, just a lot of space and a graphic designer's ego-nourishing attempt at something interesting -- these magazines tend not to be around that long.

I have also loved men's magazines -- and I don't mean Playboy and Hustler but Esquire, GQ, Maxim, the others. I've liked that they tend to make the distinction between art and ad, so that unlike women's magazines, you won't see an advertisement for shampoo and then an article on how best to wash your hair. Men's magazines seem to assume a basic intelligence in their readers. My favourite of these is Esquire I think, for its coherence -- every single story is an aspect of "man at his best" -- and for the writing which is far less uniform and blandly flawless as what you find in, say, Vogue. Esquire is a collection of the writing of individuals. While the overall message and theme and focus is always consistent and clear, each story holds the voice of its writer. I suppose an analogy might be the choir - lots of individual voices, one complete whole. You will, though, find stories on topics pretty similar to how to wash your hair, but written with a wry "we know you don't really know how to do this" sensibility that somehow seems interesting and fun rather than offensive which is how a similar story in Glamour can come off. I learned new tricks on how to wash dishes in Esquire, for example. Key factor when washing fine china and crystal: line the sink with tea towels before filling with water, so there are softer edges should you clink.

In Esquire I learned also the chilling truth of the psyche of a serial philanderer. The story was called something like "I've had 3,000 affairs" or was it 30,000? and was a first-person look at someone who simply cannot connect with women or himself. He admitted he is plain as porridge to look at, a salesman, utterly unremarkable but for this feat of the seduction of women. He can smell their vulnerability, he comes in as the nice guy they'd never suspect was capable of what his does by habit at this point; his wife found out once and said more or less, well, let's not talk about that. It's hard to know who to feel sorry for in that instance: her for her marriage to a cad or him for being married to someone who couldn't care less about herself or him. Where else but Esquire, with its willingness to help a man be his best, would you see so searing and insightful a profile of a serial offender?

Because I have read all the Vogues and other favourite magazines already this month and because I was in an airport and because I haven't visited Esquire in a while I picked up the latest issue, which has a picture of Angelina Jolie on the cover. I like Angelina, I think she is one of the more interesting women in her circle and while the marriage of plain-jane Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt never made sense to me, the connection between the two gods, Angie and Brad, seemed perfectly like-attracts-like. So I have never borne her ill-will for homewrecking and hurting one of America's sweethearts.

The picture on the cover and inside is weird, Angie looks robotic and inhuman, not the super-human goddess she usually is.

Perhaps that is a sign that something is amiss with Esquire, or maybe I've grown out of it. This time the articles on "how to wake her" seemed cutesy to the point of gagging. (Waking her doesn't involve a quick, hard thrust but instead breakfast in bed with a rather complicated recipe for what, in the end, is scrambled eggs.) There is the cutesy story of a joke (lame) told by a beautiful woman. There is a cutesy story of Ten Things Men Should Know About Women by Tea Leone which is cute cute cute. And, far more confident and assured than most women are. So what we have here is a fantasy world and a fairy tale where men are a bit awe-shucks and women are all (and I mean all) gorgeous and sexy and confident. It is all about the cult of Me, Manly -- all so boy brat I left my issue behind in the seat pocket in front of me, where the card explaining the safety features of this aircraft also hides, unread.

That said -- the profile of Angelina Jolie is extraordinary. I can't tell you if she and Brad are still an item or not. I can tell you she is building a sustainable Millennium Village in Cambodia, building a soy milk factory, water system, roads and a school on her own dime. She is reading international law. She is working out UN policy on countries such as those her children come from. She is trying to ensure that every day, each of her children receives enough attention from her that they feel equal and confident. She's trying to make a difference, to fill an emptiness she feels by doing something for the world rather than shopping. Maybe she's a freak and crazy and all the other things they say about her. Maybe it takes someone crazy to save a village no one else cares about.

Esquire is irritatingly "I'm just a cute little boy and don't you love me" but I didn't read this about her in Vogue. I did learn where her trench coat comes from. That fact is a little shameful when you think about it. No wonder Hillary won't win the White House and women still struggle for power -- as a very culture we take it away from each other.