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.