I've taken a break from Edgar Sawtelle, because my own life has become slightly more tense and the sense of impending doom was getting to me. Something will happen to these mute, sweet, defenseless characters and I don't know what it is except it will be sad, and bad.
In being mute Edgar taps into a heartbreaking boy who has followed me all my life, in different forms and found in different books. These are the boys I grew up with, and boys who grow up anywhere where having a feeling is simply not discussed. Not that it is un-masculine, it simply isn't there. When I asked my brother how his friend was doing after a breakup with a woman and mother of his kid, whom he'd been with for at least a decade, my brother shrugged and said "he's awright I guess, saw him at the bar the other day." In their inability to say, process, live whole, these boys get into big trouble. Another friend was one of these, a brilliant boy who appeared that he really was going to beat destiny. He was the youngest-ever full time photographer at a photography-heavy newspaper, he was fearless but also sensitive enough that he could always get the amazing picture of the victim, or the family, or the utterly raw look of someone who has found pain unbearable -- all the stuff of daily news photography. There was something young and vulnerable about him and even victims of terrible crimes felt some kindred spirit.
He was a bright light and going far until destiny grabbed him in a near-Shakespearean way. Drugs given by his Iago quickly became an addiction, or perhaps drugs were the Iago, making him paranoid, bitter, angry. He was no longer the hard-working wunderkind, he started to mess up, not show up, started to be aggressive where his sweet self would have opened doors and hearts.
Finally he seemed like he was going to pull out of it. He went to rehab, he came back to work, he seemed if not his old self at least someone we recognized.
One day he missed work, then the next day, then the photo editor suggested a friend and fellow photographer go round to the house to see what was up. I think they expected the bacchanalia of the past -- women, bikers, smoke, coke. What he found was our sweet friend in the back seat of his car, in the garage, the car having run dry of gas. Dead but looking merely asleep.
This is what happens to boys who cannot speak, express, deal. I don't know what will happen to Edgar Sawtelle or his dogs, but there is an Iago at work or perhaps a Claudius...someone up to no good. Too scary to go on, I've taken a break to read murder mysteries. At least with these we care less about the characters and know what to expect.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Reading the writing on the wall
And here we are, on the eve of an election and the eve of history. But what history? America is not the first racist country to elect a black person or a woman; it is, however, more proud of this achievement than others.
Every newspaper and blog is covered in thick election coverage and what a journalist friend calls the "hagiography" of Obama. No one thinks he will lose, and so as the heir apparent will soon, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, start to have his day in the light.
Of all the dark horses in this race and all the hiding in plain sight, it is Obama who has gotten off lightest.
During the primaries it was Hillary Clinton who took a lot of the fire, today it is the bumbling of the Palin-McCain camp. Palin's outfits alone have taken many an eye off any appropriate ball. Obama had the good sense to tell his own story in a couple of books, being sure to add the odd, small mea culpa -- I wonder if any of it is terribly sincere. The comment that his memory of his first kiss with his now wife "tasted of chocolate" sounds very Judy Blume. Or Ross and Rachel. A bit twee, in other words. It's a small thing, but it has the tone of an oft-repeated story valued for its "cute"; it reminds me of someone trying to show his affectionate side rather than really having one.
Now he will take on the full weight of history. He can't but fail. Far too many hopes, dreams, ill-defined expectations are resting on his head.
Great campaign though.
Every newspaper and blog is covered in thick election coverage and what a journalist friend calls the "hagiography" of Obama. No one thinks he will lose, and so as the heir apparent will soon, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, start to have his day in the light.
Of all the dark horses in this race and all the hiding in plain sight, it is Obama who has gotten off lightest.
During the primaries it was Hillary Clinton who took a lot of the fire, today it is the bumbling of the Palin-McCain camp. Palin's outfits alone have taken many an eye off any appropriate ball. Obama had the good sense to tell his own story in a couple of books, being sure to add the odd, small mea culpa -- I wonder if any of it is terribly sincere. The comment that his memory of his first kiss with his now wife "tasted of chocolate" sounds very Judy Blume. Or Ross and Rachel. A bit twee, in other words. It's a small thing, but it has the tone of an oft-repeated story valued for its "cute"; it reminds me of someone trying to show his affectionate side rather than really having one.
Now he will take on the full weight of history. He can't but fail. Far too many hopes, dreams, ill-defined expectations are resting on his head.
Great campaign though.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Edgar Sawtelle
Five years ago, on the heels of a few setbacks and a sorry breakup, I got a dog. My first.
The decision was as thought out as anything life changing can be, as in, not very well thought out at all because how can you decide on the unknown? I realized that I don't get along with people, I live a life with no responsibilities beyond getting myself out of bed and washed in the morning (and getting out of bed proves harder to do than you'd think), a life of utter self-indulgence when you look at it. I was living a life very much as I'd lived it since the age of 18, as a student....relentless "what do I want now, how can I make ME happy now?" and it was frankly boring.
So, with no partner and no children to look after I decided on a dog, a very small one because I am actually afraid of dogs. I thought tiny would be easier. I have had a great many cats in my life and a cat didn't answer the urge -- they are too independent, I wanted something that needed me. Some reason NOT to head to a bar after work. I needed a reason to go home and to like it there.
Enter Bear, as seen to your right, a very teeny beast and one, I'm given to understand, only her owner could love. She is haphazard in terms of obedience, annoyingly yappy, and a bit of a fright to look at with her long hair that is almost constantly in dreadlocks because she despises being brushed and prefers to wash her own face. In fact, though her teeth are all of 1/8 of an inch long she can indeed draw blood if you have a brush in your hand. However, despite her flawed character she is decidedly my dog, never fully happy when I'm not with her (or so I try to believe). She likes to be nearby at all times, content to watch me read books if that's what's going on; when she sees the mascara come out she starts to cry at the bathroom door by way of persuasion, "please please take me with you". When I was most depressed over yet another hard breakup she sat at my feet and stared into my face, whimpering and crying as I did not allow myself to do. My only fear in life now is that somehow I will not perfectly look after her, and if real harm were to come to her, it would kill me. I don't know how people have courage to have children -- it must be terrifying to love anything or anyone that much.
And so we come to Edgar Sawtelle, a wonderful book sometimes told from a dog's perspective, about a relationship between a silent boy and man's (and a boy's) best friend. When the boy forgets himself and Almondine can lick his face, the dog spins with joy. The dog is the boy's voice and protector, the dog is thrilled to have a job to do.
Permeating this story is a sense of dread, quiet and almost hidden but there. You know that maybe on the next page or the one after it, something will break your heart. This is the way of mute beings whether they are silent because they cannot speak or silent because they don't know the words to use. They will break your heart because you want to protect them from what they cannot comprehend or communicate, and as such they are a victim to it.
I don't know what doom is impending, just that I feel it. I have not finished this gorgeous book. But you should start it as well.
The decision was as thought out as anything life changing can be, as in, not very well thought out at all because how can you decide on the unknown? I realized that I don't get along with people, I live a life with no responsibilities beyond getting myself out of bed and washed in the morning (and getting out of bed proves harder to do than you'd think), a life of utter self-indulgence when you look at it. I was living a life very much as I'd lived it since the age of 18, as a student....relentless "what do I want now, how can I make ME happy now?" and it was frankly boring.
So, with no partner and no children to look after I decided on a dog, a very small one because I am actually afraid of dogs. I thought tiny would be easier. I have had a great many cats in my life and a cat didn't answer the urge -- they are too independent, I wanted something that needed me. Some reason NOT to head to a bar after work. I needed a reason to go home and to like it there.
Enter Bear, as seen to your right, a very teeny beast and one, I'm given to understand, only her owner could love. She is haphazard in terms of obedience, annoyingly yappy, and a bit of a fright to look at with her long hair that is almost constantly in dreadlocks because she despises being brushed and prefers to wash her own face. In fact, though her teeth are all of 1/8 of an inch long she can indeed draw blood if you have a brush in your hand. However, despite her flawed character she is decidedly my dog, never fully happy when I'm not with her (or so I try to believe). She likes to be nearby at all times, content to watch me read books if that's what's going on; when she sees the mascara come out she starts to cry at the bathroom door by way of persuasion, "please please take me with you". When I was most depressed over yet another hard breakup she sat at my feet and stared into my face, whimpering and crying as I did not allow myself to do. My only fear in life now is that somehow I will not perfectly look after her, and if real harm were to come to her, it would kill me. I don't know how people have courage to have children -- it must be terrifying to love anything or anyone that much.
And so we come to Edgar Sawtelle, a wonderful book sometimes told from a dog's perspective, about a relationship between a silent boy and man's (and a boy's) best friend. When the boy forgets himself and Almondine can lick his face, the dog spins with joy. The dog is the boy's voice and protector, the dog is thrilled to have a job to do.
Permeating this story is a sense of dread, quiet and almost hidden but there. You know that maybe on the next page or the one after it, something will break your heart. This is the way of mute beings whether they are silent because they cannot speak or silent because they don't know the words to use. They will break your heart because you want to protect them from what they cannot comprehend or communicate, and as such they are a victim to it.
I don't know what doom is impending, just that I feel it. I have not finished this gorgeous book. But you should start it as well.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Signs of the times
It is very difficult to read a book when current events are so compelling.
You won't know this because no one cared and no one voted and nothing changed but Canada had its own attempt at an election. But off course the real extravaganza is the American one.
Here we have America choosing its prejudice as much as its president, selecting between a white woman of girlish affectation and gargantuan ambition and a black(ish) man who felt glorious enough himself to pen not one but as I count it three memoirs already at the ripe old age of 47.
Though this choice would seem to suggest that America will be forced to take a step forward toward enlightenment regardless of who becomes president, one half of the choice is a big step back.
Sarah Palin is no modern woman; rather she is All About Eve, the duplicitous bitch from high school, that catty Joan Collins character in a TV show, an archetype we'd hoped had disappeared.
She has spent $150,000 since August on clothes and make-up and why not, it's showtime. The self-described hockey mom is running her campaign exactly as she ran them as a would-be beauty queen -- all cute winks and charming "you betcha"'s, answering those tough questions about foreign and economic policy as cleverly as any Miss America contestant who is required to be prepped for that sort of thing to show dimension, to show that she is not merely just another pretty face. And Palin, as vice presidential candidate for a man The Lancet suggests is medically fragile, is sitting in that cat-bird seat -- as any beauty pageant watcher knows, first runner up will ascend to Queen should the winner be unable to complete her rein.
For we women raised to assume the radical feminists just before us had strafed the chauvinistic world so we could live without having to turn the world on with our smile, it is disconcerting to see a woman succeed on the basis of a wink and a prayer. She uses all the wiles we thought, or hoped, would have no further resonance anywhere but a dinner party. Like so many Cassandras we say that such tactics don't really work anymore but we are wrong, they do work, we still live in a world that likes its women perky and cute -- and substance, well, that's great for people doing the boring stuff like foreign secretary work or something. What we have here is someone doing Sexy Secretary, up-do, glasses and pencil skirt included. She exhibits a calculating, raw ambition and for all her claimed affection for Joe Six-pack seems about as warm as her native state.
That "cute" works is depressing. But it works all over the show -- in a recent article, Kate Moss describes her relationship with her boss as one where she has merely to wheedle "please Uncle Phil" and her wish is his command. To connect a model with a presidential candidate may seem crazy but look at it -- Moss is supposedly one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history, a self-made success story, cleverly turning her stylishness into money by partnering with Topshop. Sadly she is a business woman who gets by on cute as much as acumen but perhaps it is excusable if not laudable -- she does get by on her looks. It makes you appreciate Madonna more, another savvy businesswoman who would bust a ball as much as play it. Thank heaven for her, one of the few girl-powerhouses who, we suspect, never wheedles.
It's a troubling time to be female. I would say it is a troubling time to be American, but sadly, the significance is larger than that. Imagine Palin, defender of the free world, in discussions with Putin. Let's hope he has a kid in hockey or we're toast.
You won't know this because no one cared and no one voted and nothing changed but Canada had its own attempt at an election. But off course the real extravaganza is the American one.
Here we have America choosing its prejudice as much as its president, selecting between a white woman of girlish affectation and gargantuan ambition and a black(ish) man who felt glorious enough himself to pen not one but as I count it three memoirs already at the ripe old age of 47.
Though this choice would seem to suggest that America will be forced to take a step forward toward enlightenment regardless of who becomes president, one half of the choice is a big step back.
Sarah Palin is no modern woman; rather she is All About Eve, the duplicitous bitch from high school, that catty Joan Collins character in a TV show, an archetype we'd hoped had disappeared.
She has spent $150,000 since August on clothes and make-up and why not, it's showtime. The self-described hockey mom is running her campaign exactly as she ran them as a would-be beauty queen -- all cute winks and charming "you betcha"'s, answering those tough questions about foreign and economic policy as cleverly as any Miss America contestant who is required to be prepped for that sort of thing to show dimension, to show that she is not merely just another pretty face. And Palin, as vice presidential candidate for a man The Lancet suggests is medically fragile, is sitting in that cat-bird seat -- as any beauty pageant watcher knows, first runner up will ascend to Queen should the winner be unable to complete her rein.
For we women raised to assume the radical feminists just before us had strafed the chauvinistic world so we could live without having to turn the world on with our smile, it is disconcerting to see a woman succeed on the basis of a wink and a prayer. She uses all the wiles we thought, or hoped, would have no further resonance anywhere but a dinner party. Like so many Cassandras we say that such tactics don't really work anymore but we are wrong, they do work, we still live in a world that likes its women perky and cute -- and substance, well, that's great for people doing the boring stuff like foreign secretary work or something. What we have here is someone doing Sexy Secretary, up-do, glasses and pencil skirt included. She exhibits a calculating, raw ambition and for all her claimed affection for Joe Six-pack seems about as warm as her native state.
That "cute" works is depressing. But it works all over the show -- in a recent article, Kate Moss describes her relationship with her boss as one where she has merely to wheedle "please Uncle Phil" and her wish is his command. To connect a model with a presidential candidate may seem crazy but look at it -- Moss is supposedly one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history, a self-made success story, cleverly turning her stylishness into money by partnering with Topshop. Sadly she is a business woman who gets by on cute as much as acumen but perhaps it is excusable if not laudable -- she does get by on her looks. It makes you appreciate Madonna more, another savvy businesswoman who would bust a ball as much as play it. Thank heaven for her, one of the few girl-powerhouses who, we suspect, never wheedles.
It's a troubling time to be female. I would say it is a troubling time to be American, but sadly, the significance is larger than that. Imagine Palin, defender of the free world, in discussions with Putin. Let's hope he has a kid in hockey or we're toast.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Always say thank you
Margaret Visser has the kind of voice that a Brit might call "plummy" though it seems to me to be something closer to caramel or dark fudge sauce. In other words, she is someone you want to listen to even if she's merely reading the phone book.
Who is she and how do we know this? At first we thought she was an academic dug up by the diligent producers of the CBC -- she was a regular on Morningside back when it existed; she may still be a regular of the CBC but I am not.
Lucky for us, though, she is also and perhaps foremost an author of remarkable books on tiny subjects, "micro histories" they are now called, now that this has morphed into a full-on genre.
A beloved much earlier book, Much Depends on Dinner, was about dinner --she traced the history and social mores behind the most typical of plain suppers, roast chicken with potatoes, corn -- and how each element came to be on our plate and its place in the world of agriculture, commerce, culture. She spoke of it weekly on the radio, and reading it was even better. Delicious.
Her newest book is The Gift of Thanks, a clever bit of scholarship on the history and meaning of gratitude. Fingers crossed that if there is an audio version, she is the one who is reading aloud. That would be something to be grateful for.
Gratitude is often in short supply.
There is very little that is more alluring, charming, engaging, warm.
Twenty-four hours ago I left the memorial service of a woman I never met but wish I had; a woman who had such a force of personality, whose life force was so strong that I, a total stranger, was touched by her, moved by her example, and I like all of her friends and her family am determined to learn from her so that she did not die in vain.
In short, she was a great many things that can be summed up by the fact she was grateful. She loved life and knew it to be a gift, she lived every moment, she fought for things worth fighting for and laughed at the rest. She could see the funny side, she chose to be thankful for what she had rather than lament what she didn't -- and what she didn't have was profound. She didn't have health and therefore didn't have time, the time to see her kids grow up or to see her garden bloom. No matter.
From the stories her friends and family told of her, from the deep grief they feel, from the photographs that show her bright smiling, always smiling, face it is clear she was remarkable and someone put on earth to show the rest of us how it's done. In particular there were two photos of her with her husband -- one on their wedding day, one where she is leaning her head against his shoulder and what we see is the utter contentment and quiet happiness of loving and being loved, and knowing that love will never be forsaken.
She loved. Loved life, she loved her family, she loved her friends, career, books, music, her garden, her home. She was postive, a light in the darkness, she did not take for granted, not anything, not one thing.
Appreciate more. Be more kind than is necessary, everyone has their own struggle. Show gratitude.
What a good book at the right time.
Who is she and how do we know this? At first we thought she was an academic dug up by the diligent producers of the CBC -- she was a regular on Morningside back when it existed; she may still be a regular of the CBC but I am not.
Lucky for us, though, she is also and perhaps foremost an author of remarkable books on tiny subjects, "micro histories" they are now called, now that this has morphed into a full-on genre.
A beloved much earlier book, Much Depends on Dinner, was about dinner --she traced the history and social mores behind the most typical of plain suppers, roast chicken with potatoes, corn -- and how each element came to be on our plate and its place in the world of agriculture, commerce, culture. She spoke of it weekly on the radio, and reading it was even better. Delicious.
Her newest book is The Gift of Thanks, a clever bit of scholarship on the history and meaning of gratitude. Fingers crossed that if there is an audio version, she is the one who is reading aloud. That would be something to be grateful for.
Gratitude is often in short supply.
There is very little that is more alluring, charming, engaging, warm.
Twenty-four hours ago I left the memorial service of a woman I never met but wish I had; a woman who had such a force of personality, whose life force was so strong that I, a total stranger, was touched by her, moved by her example, and I like all of her friends and her family am determined to learn from her so that she did not die in vain.
In short, she was a great many things that can be summed up by the fact she was grateful. She loved life and knew it to be a gift, she lived every moment, she fought for things worth fighting for and laughed at the rest. She could see the funny side, she chose to be thankful for what she had rather than lament what she didn't -- and what she didn't have was profound. She didn't have health and therefore didn't have time, the time to see her kids grow up or to see her garden bloom. No matter.
From the stories her friends and family told of her, from the deep grief they feel, from the photographs that show her bright smiling, always smiling, face it is clear she was remarkable and someone put on earth to show the rest of us how it's done. In particular there were two photos of her with her husband -- one on their wedding day, one where she is leaning her head against his shoulder and what we see is the utter contentment and quiet happiness of loving and being loved, and knowing that love will never be forsaken.
She loved. Loved life, she loved her family, she loved her friends, career, books, music, her garden, her home. She was postive, a light in the darkness, she did not take for granted, not anything, not one thing.
Appreciate more. Be more kind than is necessary, everyone has their own struggle. Show gratitude.
What a good book at the right time.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Reading like a man
There is a stack of books on my bedside table which makes me feel quite manly. I've never known one, a man I mean, who has the stick-to-it-ive-ness to settle on just the one; rather, I've witnessed the casual browse through this book until it gets sloggy, then that one, maybe back to the first, always on a search for whatever it is they search for. Excitment I suppose.
It's enough to make a girl shake in her Laboutins. But let's assume a reading pattern isn't a lifestyle....
When Will There Be Good News is another fantastic story by the fantastic Kate Atkinson. Her first book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is on my permanent list of suggestions for anyone jaded by books and in need of a read. The direction her writing has taken was not predictable by this first excellent attempt; she's moved from the initial appearance of literary fiction tending to chick lit to become a sort of mystery writer but of the best kind. There is a story, there are real characters and real pathos, the mystery feels eerie and sad rather than formulaic. And, Atkinson can capture a child on paper like no other. That we did see in Museum.
Lover of Unreason is a biography of a minor character (a personal favorite though you won't find these on the best seller lists), the tragic second wife of Ted Hughes, a man who is either a cad beyond comprehension or the unluckiest bastard on earth. Perhaps we should check the bedside table for clues. You will recall his first wife Sylvia Plath offed herself after giving the children their lunch, sticking her head in the gas oven. At least the children were saved. Not so the child of Ted and Assia Wevill, a tortured (maybe by Ted, maybe not) beauty and a poet in her own right. Assia grew up the cherished and spoilt daughter of a lazy physician and his wife; the family fled Nazi Germany for Israel where daddy was one of a multitude of physicians caring for impoverished and not very sick people without healthcare insurance to mitigate any costs. So, times were a little tough. How she meets Ted and why she ended up with her own pretty head in the oven we don't know yet. As I say, I'm reading like a man, a little here and a little there.
Both books are equally compelling in their own way you see.
Maybe that's a larger metaphor than I think......and an answer to the mystery of Mars.
It's enough to make a girl shake in her Laboutins. But let's assume a reading pattern isn't a lifestyle....
When Will There Be Good News is another fantastic story by the fantastic Kate Atkinson. Her first book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is on my permanent list of suggestions for anyone jaded by books and in need of a read. The direction her writing has taken was not predictable by this first excellent attempt; she's moved from the initial appearance of literary fiction tending to chick lit to become a sort of mystery writer but of the best kind. There is a story, there are real characters and real pathos, the mystery feels eerie and sad rather than formulaic. And, Atkinson can capture a child on paper like no other. That we did see in Museum.
Lover of Unreason is a biography of a minor character (a personal favorite though you won't find these on the best seller lists), the tragic second wife of Ted Hughes, a man who is either a cad beyond comprehension or the unluckiest bastard on earth. Perhaps we should check the bedside table for clues. You will recall his first wife Sylvia Plath offed herself after giving the children their lunch, sticking her head in the gas oven. At least the children were saved. Not so the child of Ted and Assia Wevill, a tortured (maybe by Ted, maybe not) beauty and a poet in her own right. Assia grew up the cherished and spoilt daughter of a lazy physician and his wife; the family fled Nazi Germany for Israel where daddy was one of a multitude of physicians caring for impoverished and not very sick people without healthcare insurance to mitigate any costs. So, times were a little tough. How she meets Ted and why she ended up with her own pretty head in the oven we don't know yet. As I say, I'm reading like a man, a little here and a little there.
Both books are equally compelling in their own way you see.
Maybe that's a larger metaphor than I think......and an answer to the mystery of Mars.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
It's been a while
Writing has taken the place of reading over the summer -- there has been scant time to sit on the terrace with a good book and a glass of wine, few free Saturday afternoons to lose to someone else's story.
What a shame.
A summer without reading, a summer without a whole wodge of great books and the adventures they bring is a summer without sunshine.
And we've had that, too!
The good thing about rainy fall days is....it's wonderful to tuck in, light some candles, adjust the lighting and dive in to the books again. This we will do.
What a shame.
A summer without reading, a summer without a whole wodge of great books and the adventures they bring is a summer without sunshine.
And we've had that, too!
The good thing about rainy fall days is....it's wonderful to tuck in, light some candles, adjust the lighting and dive in to the books again. This we will do.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The banality of evil
I have never understood the term "the banality of evil". Having seen it, evil seems anything but banal; in fact, quite the opposite, creating a gushing, sickening wash of adrenalin that is perhaps addictive to some. That the perpetrators of real cruelty seem so casual about it might lead one to think that there is a banality to evil but even then the effect of the actions is so profound that their relative calm in the face of it seems to add to the horror. That one becomes inured to evil, or cruelty, is also nothing but a mask.
So why think about Hannah Arendt's apparently wise words now?
I have just watched, twice, a police interview almost exactly a year ago with serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo. The police were questioning him about the 1990 disappearance and murder of Elizabeth Bain, as the man convicted of killing her, her boyfriend, has been freed by the courts and there is no one else around to take the blame.
Canada is a small country and once we have a star that star will serve for everything. Ralph Benmurgi is a TV personality of dubious merit who will always find a home somewhere on the CBC; you'd think only Margaret Atwood ever wrote a book and the poor woman is called upon for a quote about everything from what is "Canadian" (answer: a beer) to the weather; Anne Murray needs never record again and will still be our national songbird and we have the one good serial killer so let's let him fill in for every mystery remaining on the books.
Bernardo, I had been told by insiders, had gone to fat in the dungeon-like prison he will die in but that's not true -- the interview, broadcast today on national television, shows a man who looks somehow younger than he did at trial as though there is a picture in an attic somewhere growing more haggard and wrinkly by the day; he is thin as to seem delicate. I didn't cover all of his trial and so only heard his voice on tape as he was raping young girls, when there was a barely contained joy in it, and that joy was chilling. In the tape of his interview his voice is light, airy, slightly whiny, hardly scary at all except in its somewhat flat tone and weirdly feminine quality. He looks not like a vicious, sadistic torturer, rapist and slow murderer but rather like a guy who'd be beaten in the schoolyard just 'cause.
Is that what the banality of evil means? I don't find it that at all. He is terrifying for being so easily hidden, he really can pass for one of us. For a nothing-to-be-scared of less-than-us in fact.
I interviewed his last rape victim who lived, if living can be what you'd call it. She was nearly dead from the attack and police told me that they were convinced that whoever did this to her would murder the next victim, her injuries were such that their guess was he was scared off somehow. She spent the next weeks and months shattered, unable to leave her home, sleeping curled at the end of her parents' bed like a frightened dog. How did it happen that she was raped? She knew there was a rapist afoot in her neighborhood when she got off the bus late that night, someone got off right behind her. She turned around, scared, and saw Bernardo and thought "whew, I'm okay." THAT's how mild he looks.
Having heard the interview I would have to say I have no idea at all if he was lying or not. He didn't admit to abducting and killing Elizabeth Bain, a young university student who vanished one sunny afternoon and whose body has never been recovered. He seemed to have little interest in what was being asked of him and the police seemed to have little interest in asking it -- you have never seen or heard anything as deeply boring as a real police interview. I suspect they save the good stuff for when the recording machines are turned off. Given that he will live for the rest of his days in a 5x8 ft. cement box you would think he'd be willing to trade information on where her body can be found for cable TV or a lakeside view -- the dungeon he lives in is on the shores of Lake Ontario -- but it seems no such deal was offered. If he killed Bain he couldn't be assed to say so, and he couldn't be assed to deny it very vehemently. Why should he do either? Nothing much changes in his world and her parents' torment about simply not knowing what happened to her would matter not and nought.
Bernardo seems utterly harmless and yet is capable of unspeakable acts. The court artist who drew him daily during his trial suggested maybe he raped and then killed and then tortured-and-killed in an escalating madness simply so he could feel .... SOMETHING, to be relieved of the bland dullness to which an unfeeling psychopath is sentenced. So how perfect that his criminal sentence was not execution, but life -- actual life, not criminal justice life, he will never be released from prison in a small blank cell to the end of his endless days -- he has been sentenced to utter boredom. The worst and only torture for someone like him.
I think my own understanding of the banality of evil must be in this flat affect, that the only one who suffers is the victim and those around the victim, that the perpetrator apparently moves on to live much as he did before. Maybe in a nice flat somewhere, maybe in a prison cell. Maybe it doesn't matter. Evil only matters to the victim, the perpetrator will never hurt. He can't be made to hurt, he doesn't have the stuff. Victims of casual cruelty will suffer the more for this. Their pain cannot possibly be answered.
The living rape victims and the parents of the dead girls must be driven insane by thoughts of what Bernardo has done and what he has destroyed, and I liked the idea that Bernardo was sentenced to boredom, it seemed Biblically fitting, it seemed like it would really get to him, really drive him equally mad. But there is no justice. The calm and casual guy the police interviewed that day seems just fine. He is in prison, sure. He really doesn't seem to mind much.
So why think about Hannah Arendt's apparently wise words now?
I have just watched, twice, a police interview almost exactly a year ago with serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo. The police were questioning him about the 1990 disappearance and murder of Elizabeth Bain, as the man convicted of killing her, her boyfriend, has been freed by the courts and there is no one else around to take the blame.
Canada is a small country and once we have a star that star will serve for everything. Ralph Benmurgi is a TV personality of dubious merit who will always find a home somewhere on the CBC; you'd think only Margaret Atwood ever wrote a book and the poor woman is called upon for a quote about everything from what is "Canadian" (answer: a beer) to the weather; Anne Murray needs never record again and will still be our national songbird and we have the one good serial killer so let's let him fill in for every mystery remaining on the books.
Bernardo, I had been told by insiders, had gone to fat in the dungeon-like prison he will die in but that's not true -- the interview, broadcast today on national television, shows a man who looks somehow younger than he did at trial as though there is a picture in an attic somewhere growing more haggard and wrinkly by the day; he is thin as to seem delicate. I didn't cover all of his trial and so only heard his voice on tape as he was raping young girls, when there was a barely contained joy in it, and that joy was chilling. In the tape of his interview his voice is light, airy, slightly whiny, hardly scary at all except in its somewhat flat tone and weirdly feminine quality. He looks not like a vicious, sadistic torturer, rapist and slow murderer but rather like a guy who'd be beaten in the schoolyard just 'cause.
Is that what the banality of evil means? I don't find it that at all. He is terrifying for being so easily hidden, he really can pass for one of us. For a nothing-to-be-scared of less-than-us in fact.
I interviewed his last rape victim who lived, if living can be what you'd call it. She was nearly dead from the attack and police told me that they were convinced that whoever did this to her would murder the next victim, her injuries were such that their guess was he was scared off somehow. She spent the next weeks and months shattered, unable to leave her home, sleeping curled at the end of her parents' bed like a frightened dog. How did it happen that she was raped? She knew there was a rapist afoot in her neighborhood when she got off the bus late that night, someone got off right behind her. She turned around, scared, and saw Bernardo and thought "whew, I'm okay." THAT's how mild he looks.
Having heard the interview I would have to say I have no idea at all if he was lying or not. He didn't admit to abducting and killing Elizabeth Bain, a young university student who vanished one sunny afternoon and whose body has never been recovered. He seemed to have little interest in what was being asked of him and the police seemed to have little interest in asking it -- you have never seen or heard anything as deeply boring as a real police interview. I suspect they save the good stuff for when the recording machines are turned off. Given that he will live for the rest of his days in a 5x8 ft. cement box you would think he'd be willing to trade information on where her body can be found for cable TV or a lakeside view -- the dungeon he lives in is on the shores of Lake Ontario -- but it seems no such deal was offered. If he killed Bain he couldn't be assed to say so, and he couldn't be assed to deny it very vehemently. Why should he do either? Nothing much changes in his world and her parents' torment about simply not knowing what happened to her would matter not and nought.
Bernardo seems utterly harmless and yet is capable of unspeakable acts. The court artist who drew him daily during his trial suggested maybe he raped and then killed and then tortured-and-killed in an escalating madness simply so he could feel .... SOMETHING, to be relieved of the bland dullness to which an unfeeling psychopath is sentenced. So how perfect that his criminal sentence was not execution, but life -- actual life, not criminal justice life, he will never be released from prison in a small blank cell to the end of his endless days -- he has been sentenced to utter boredom. The worst and only torture for someone like him.
I think my own understanding of the banality of evil must be in this flat affect, that the only one who suffers is the victim and those around the victim, that the perpetrator apparently moves on to live much as he did before. Maybe in a nice flat somewhere, maybe in a prison cell. Maybe it doesn't matter. Evil only matters to the victim, the perpetrator will never hurt. He can't be made to hurt, he doesn't have the stuff. Victims of casual cruelty will suffer the more for this. Their pain cannot possibly be answered.
The living rape victims and the parents of the dead girls must be driven insane by thoughts of what Bernardo has done and what he has destroyed, and I liked the idea that Bernardo was sentenced to boredom, it seemed Biblically fitting, it seemed like it would really get to him, really drive him equally mad. But there is no justice. The calm and casual guy the police interviewed that day seems just fine. He is in prison, sure. He really doesn't seem to mind much.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
On Hillary
The weekend papers are filled with "what she did wrong" stories and analysis but the best words that say the most about Hillary Clinton are Hillary's own.
In true Clinton tradition, her final going away speech seems to have been tear-jerking, memorable, historic. The NYT reports that "For 28 minutes, standing alone on a stage in the historic National Building Museum, Mrs. Clinton spoke not only about the importance of electing Mr. Obama, but also about the extent to which her campaign was a milestone for women. She urged women had supported her -- who had turned out at her headquarters, flocked to her rallies and poured into the polls to vote for her -- not to take the wrong lesson from her loss.
" "You can be so proud that from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States....To those who are disappointed that we couldn't go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours."
"At that point the cheers, mostly from women, swelled so loud that Mrs. Clinton's remaining words could not be heard."
That is an elegant bit of reporting and if you think it's easy to pull off in the heat of such a moment, it isn't. But more than that, what an elegant speech. Obama did himself proud as well, in being respectful to Hillary for her role in inspiring his own young daughters.
History will tell, but it seems that Hillary's team failed to fully understand the effect of online to influence people and to drive community, a movement. Much as historians now say the dramatic shift that swept JFK to power was his ability to intuit the power of television while Nixon did not, this may be the great learning and deeper understanding we are to have about the media age we now live in. More traditionally, it seemed to me that Hillary could not win for losing -- that the candidates were neck-and-neck but it was spelled as her failure and her loss, not his failure to gain a greater groundswell if he was so damn popular. Maybe that's the rub when you were a front-runner. She seemed to play an old-fashioned political game of pulling in chips, playing hardball with her opponent and risking "bitch", of being a down and dirty. We are told now that this was the tone of the Clinton years and it is out of fashion now. Who knows what went on in the backrooms at Club Obama. He seemed to be able to keep the weather sunnier, regardless of what may become the truth.
Obama became a master showman, his early tentative and timid tone now replaced with glorious presidential (at least as far as we see in movies) rhetoric. Maybe that's all a president needs to be, much as that is all (I think) a Queen needs to be. Stand for something, give the people something to believe in, stir their flagging hope. After that, doesn't much matter what you do. Maybe you shouldn't go to war unless it's really, really clear you need to. Aside from that, being president might be the easiest job in the world.
We love Bill Clinton, and why? Because he spoke so well. Seemed so charming. We forgave him everything including ....what did he do for a living again?
How perfect that he now makes his living....speaking. Play your best game, that's the message.
For all the talk of "change", ironically, Obama seems very Clinton-ish, with his warm wash of wonderful words. We may have seen Obama's best game. I don't think we've seen Hillary's. And right now, that seems a pity.
In true Clinton tradition, her final going away speech seems to have been tear-jerking, memorable, historic. The NYT reports that "For 28 minutes, standing alone on a stage in the historic National Building Museum, Mrs. Clinton spoke not only about the importance of electing Mr. Obama, but also about the extent to which her campaign was a milestone for women. She urged women had supported her -- who had turned out at her headquarters, flocked to her rallies and poured into the polls to vote for her -- not to take the wrong lesson from her loss.
" "You can be so proud that from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States....To those who are disappointed that we couldn't go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours."
"At that point the cheers, mostly from women, swelled so loud that Mrs. Clinton's remaining words could not be heard."
That is an elegant bit of reporting and if you think it's easy to pull off in the heat of such a moment, it isn't. But more than that, what an elegant speech. Obama did himself proud as well, in being respectful to Hillary for her role in inspiring his own young daughters.
History will tell, but it seems that Hillary's team failed to fully understand the effect of online to influence people and to drive community, a movement. Much as historians now say the dramatic shift that swept JFK to power was his ability to intuit the power of television while Nixon did not, this may be the great learning and deeper understanding we are to have about the media age we now live in. More traditionally, it seemed to me that Hillary could not win for losing -- that the candidates were neck-and-neck but it was spelled as her failure and her loss, not his failure to gain a greater groundswell if he was so damn popular. Maybe that's the rub when you were a front-runner. She seemed to play an old-fashioned political game of pulling in chips, playing hardball with her opponent and risking "bitch", of being a down and dirty. We are told now that this was the tone of the Clinton years and it is out of fashion now. Who knows what went on in the backrooms at Club Obama. He seemed to be able to keep the weather sunnier, regardless of what may become the truth.
Obama became a master showman, his early tentative and timid tone now replaced with glorious presidential (at least as far as we see in movies) rhetoric. Maybe that's all a president needs to be, much as that is all (I think) a Queen needs to be. Stand for something, give the people something to believe in, stir their flagging hope. After that, doesn't much matter what you do. Maybe you shouldn't go to war unless it's really, really clear you need to. Aside from that, being president might be the easiest job in the world.
We love Bill Clinton, and why? Because he spoke so well. Seemed so charming. We forgave him everything including ....what did he do for a living again?
How perfect that he now makes his living....speaking. Play your best game, that's the message.
For all the talk of "change", ironically, Obama seems very Clinton-ish, with his warm wash of wonderful words. We may have seen Obama's best game. I don't think we've seen Hillary's. And right now, that seems a pity.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Sex and the City
Boys have their toys plus Matrix, Die Hard, James Bond and Val Kilmer films. Girls have Sex and the City.
Who would have thought that a so-so column in a so-so newspaper would become a so-so book would become a blockbuster mass movement?
During my more annoying or pathetic jags my brother will call and say "Hi Carrie, is Samantha there?" in an attempt to conjure a more cheerio my deario attitude, to help me get my groove back. My brother lives in a tiny town in the middle of the bald open prairie -- that he, a man's man in a remote empty wilderness not only knows that there is a Carrie and a Samantha but can articulate their relative merits and differences shows just how deeply the friends from NYC have permeated the culture.
Millions of words have been written about the SATC movie launched last week -- apparently most tickets are being purchased in groups, a sure sign that girls and their girlfriends are flocking; Cosmo parties are held in theatre lobbies; even a group of breast cancer survivors added seeing the flick to the panapoly of things they bond over, as reported in the New York Times.
Critics suggest that the movie isn't that good, which seems to be missing the point of it. The movie exists because there is not a woman in North America who can't identify which of the four friends she most resembles. The series itself was not much more than a fantastic cartoon that somehow wiggled its way into resonating with the way women really live, or would really like to live, in all life's messy glory. As television, SATC dared to show women as both venal or silly and at the same time deeply loyal at least to each other -- as caricatures they managed to be more nuanced than a lot of other versions on a lot of other shows. The fab four were both decent and shallow, they fought and made up, they drank too much and swore far too much, had sex with deeply inappropriate men and were as non-committal in relationships as men appear to be. In the early going someone wrote that SATC was not actually about girlfriends at all but rather about four gay men or more accurately, four big queens. Over time, what made them hugely appealing was that not one of them was good or bad, they were flawed just like real people but they had one huge dreamy advantage over the rest of us -- they had each other, through thick or thin. They didn't have to put their eggs in a relationship basket, each had THREE strong people in their corner at all times.
That bond of friendship is the real appeal, because it's so wonderful to contemplate and so rare. Years ago, when I was suffering my first huge heartbreak a friend -- a guy -- looked at my tear-dripping face and said simply "You need some good girlfriends." He was so right! and yet good girlfriends, or friends period, are hard to find. Twice in my life great friends, colleagues I worked with for years, turned out to be about proximity; once we were no longer in each other's faces, quite literally by means of workspace, I saw little of them. Girlfriends come and go with the vagaries of boyfriends and husbands and babies and soccer to attend to; there is almost always something a bit more important than getting together with your gal pals. So the luxury displayed weekly on SATC, TV version, was not so much the Manolos or the thousand-dollar t-shirts, the luxury was the solid footing each woman had with the others. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte each knew she could call at 3am and the others would rally, she could count on the others to show up for brunch, she could count on her friends to both celebrate with her and save her as the moment required.
The movie may have messed with this essential DNA a bit, rendering the girls a little less distinct -- one criticism is that in the film they've even started to dress alike -- but the groundswell of grassroots approval shows that real live women, grown ups, weren't ready to say goodbye to their fake friends. Perhaps the series and the movie also stand as a template for creating better real ones.
Who would have thought that a so-so column in a so-so newspaper would become a so-so book would become a blockbuster mass movement?
During my more annoying or pathetic jags my brother will call and say "Hi Carrie, is Samantha there?" in an attempt to conjure a more cheerio my deario attitude, to help me get my groove back. My brother lives in a tiny town in the middle of the bald open prairie -- that he, a man's man in a remote empty wilderness not only knows that there is a Carrie and a Samantha but can articulate their relative merits and differences shows just how deeply the friends from NYC have permeated the culture.
Millions of words have been written about the SATC movie launched last week -- apparently most tickets are being purchased in groups, a sure sign that girls and their girlfriends are flocking; Cosmo parties are held in theatre lobbies; even a group of breast cancer survivors added seeing the flick to the panapoly of things they bond over, as reported in the New York Times.
Critics suggest that the movie isn't that good, which seems to be missing the point of it. The movie exists because there is not a woman in North America who can't identify which of the four friends she most resembles. The series itself was not much more than a fantastic cartoon that somehow wiggled its way into resonating with the way women really live, or would really like to live, in all life's messy glory. As television, SATC dared to show women as both venal or silly and at the same time deeply loyal at least to each other -- as caricatures they managed to be more nuanced than a lot of other versions on a lot of other shows. The fab four were both decent and shallow, they fought and made up, they drank too much and swore far too much, had sex with deeply inappropriate men and were as non-committal in relationships as men appear to be. In the early going someone wrote that SATC was not actually about girlfriends at all but rather about four gay men or more accurately, four big queens. Over time, what made them hugely appealing was that not one of them was good or bad, they were flawed just like real people but they had one huge dreamy advantage over the rest of us -- they had each other, through thick or thin. They didn't have to put their eggs in a relationship basket, each had THREE strong people in their corner at all times.
That bond of friendship is the real appeal, because it's so wonderful to contemplate and so rare. Years ago, when I was suffering my first huge heartbreak a friend -- a guy -- looked at my tear-dripping face and said simply "You need some good girlfriends." He was so right! and yet good girlfriends, or friends period, are hard to find. Twice in my life great friends, colleagues I worked with for years, turned out to be about proximity; once we were no longer in each other's faces, quite literally by means of workspace, I saw little of them. Girlfriends come and go with the vagaries of boyfriends and husbands and babies and soccer to attend to; there is almost always something a bit more important than getting together with your gal pals. So the luxury displayed weekly on SATC, TV version, was not so much the Manolos or the thousand-dollar t-shirts, the luxury was the solid footing each woman had with the others. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte each knew she could call at 3am and the others would rally, she could count on the others to show up for brunch, she could count on her friends to both celebrate with her and save her as the moment required.
The movie may have messed with this essential DNA a bit, rendering the girls a little less distinct -- one criticism is that in the film they've even started to dress alike -- but the groundswell of grassroots approval shows that real live women, grown ups, weren't ready to say goodbye to their fake friends. Perhaps the series and the movie also stand as a template for creating better real ones.
Monday, May 19, 2008
The things you read....
The Purity Ball is a nine-year old invention created by the Wilson family, a family with a ton of children some of whom have names like Khrystian. That's Christian, in case their prediliction escapes you.
This is ostensibly a really nice thing, sort of like its sister the Debutante Ball, wherein girls are presented to the world and each other by their fathers.
Both the Deb Ball and the Purity Ball, to my way of thinking, and you can call me cynical, put the ick in sick.
Let's return for a moment to the Purity Ball. Here girls get dressed up in ballgowns to go on a date with Dad. Their dads stand up and swear that the girls will remain virgins until their wedding nights. Or until death if no one takes them off the market. The dads swear they will be good examples, keep it in their pants, and won't run off with the secretary leaving the moms behind. The language is probably crafted more nicely, but that's the gist.
See for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/19purity.html?scp=1&sq=purity+ball&st=nyt
I have one of those non-modern dads who brought home the bacon and cooked it on Sunday mornings, who fixed things, who was the go-to for discipline when my brothers and I were particularly badly behaved, and who remained largely silent in my life. He was always very gentle and nice to our kittens, and adores my tiny dog. It's quite amusing to see this huge 6-ft 2-in man playing with a 3-lb scruffy mutt. We lived with a nice sort of benign indifference -- I knew he was always there should I need him, and I never did mostly because I knew he was always there. If you see what I mean.
Growing up is never easy, but it is especially not easy when you are closely scrutinized. How do you become yourSELF when other people are weighing in on what you should think, do, decide? Add to this the perceived humiliations and mortifications of adolescence. To have your dad stand up and talk about your purity, to talk about sex, strikes me as a huge infringement on something deeply personal and quite frankly none of his business. That he should have such an interest strikes me as a bit creepy.
How about this. How about if dad behaved like a good father every day, and how about if mom and dad sort of led by example? You know, skipped the "do as I say not as I do" trip? How about they raise their kids to have self respect and confidence? And then how about they simply step back and watch you flourish?
Rather than take you to a dance and swear to your virginity, which is fundamentally and utterly yours to protect or abandon as you choose. One of the few things you can use as a marker of the transition between childhood and being a grown-up.
This is ostensibly a really nice thing, sort of like its sister the Debutante Ball, wherein girls are presented to the world and each other by their fathers.
Both the Deb Ball and the Purity Ball, to my way of thinking, and you can call me cynical, put the ick in sick.
Let's return for a moment to the Purity Ball. Here girls get dressed up in ballgowns to go on a date with Dad. Their dads stand up and swear that the girls will remain virgins until their wedding nights. Or until death if no one takes them off the market. The dads swear they will be good examples, keep it in their pants, and won't run off with the secretary leaving the moms behind. The language is probably crafted more nicely, but that's the gist.
See for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/19purity.html?scp=1&sq=purity+ball&st=nyt
I have one of those non-modern dads who brought home the bacon and cooked it on Sunday mornings, who fixed things, who was the go-to for discipline when my brothers and I were particularly badly behaved, and who remained largely silent in my life. He was always very gentle and nice to our kittens, and adores my tiny dog. It's quite amusing to see this huge 6-ft 2-in man playing with a 3-lb scruffy mutt. We lived with a nice sort of benign indifference -- I knew he was always there should I need him, and I never did mostly because I knew he was always there. If you see what I mean.
Growing up is never easy, but it is especially not easy when you are closely scrutinized. How do you become yourSELF when other people are weighing in on what you should think, do, decide? Add to this the perceived humiliations and mortifications of adolescence. To have your dad stand up and talk about your purity, to talk about sex, strikes me as a huge infringement on something deeply personal and quite frankly none of his business. That he should have such an interest strikes me as a bit creepy.
How about this. How about if dad behaved like a good father every day, and how about if mom and dad sort of led by example? You know, skipped the "do as I say not as I do" trip? How about they raise their kids to have self respect and confidence? And then how about they simply step back and watch you flourish?
Rather than take you to a dance and swear to your virginity, which is fundamentally and utterly yours to protect or abandon as you choose. One of the few things you can use as a marker of the transition between childhood and being a grown-up.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Mommy dearest
So you think you have the mother of all mothers.
Read this, from the Times:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3842502.ece
"Michel Houellebecq is a literary icon whose novels have been acclaimed by critics as the cruel illumination of a troubled era.
But France's most celebrated and controversial contemporary author could be pushed off his pinnacle following an astonishingly vitriolic attack from a critic with a unique insight into his oeuvre.
She is his mother - and she is threatening to knock his teeth out with her walking stick if he mentions her again in one of his works.
In a book of her own to be published next week, Lucie Ceccaldi depicts the cult writer as an untalented social climber whose ego is only matched by his dishonesty. "
And oh, she does go on:
" “This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame,” Mrs Ceccaldi, 83, writes in L'Innocente, an autobiography."
Seems he started it, according to her. See, he wrote a book in which a despicable character called Ceccaldi abandonned her kids and took off to have sex in a sex community on the Riviera.
He could at least have changed the name I suppose.
The mother of imagination is a warm and soft place to go to be told that everything is going to be alright, you are just fine, you are wonderful, you are everything you hope you are. The maternal instinct, we are told, is an instinct, that it automatically kicks in and swathes progeny in the warm glow of unstinting love and approval.
Would that this were so. "Mother" is one of the enduring myths of civilization but in fact, if we were to look at the facts and the writing on the wall, that instinct kicks in intermittently and relatively infrequently.
My view may be warped by years of crime reporting where I was daily astonished by mothers who backed their abusive husbands versus supporting their sexually abused daughters; who stood by as fathers shook their babies to death or frankly, shook them themselves; who weekly participated in the shocking physical and emotional abuse of their own children. It always interested me that so long as there was a man to blame the courts would punish him more harshly, giving more prison time to him than the mother when in fact, to my way of thinking anyway, it is SHE who is further against nature. But the myth is so prevalent that even crusty judges cannot quite believe clear evidence and therefore mommy mustn't really have been entirely to blame.
But my view is also influenced by my circle of friends -- I have just one acquaintance who says she has the best mother on earth and who turns to her mother for love and support when she's feeling the world is against her. The rest of us have a slightly more distant relationship. Another of my friends has a mother who asked her if she were putting grey highlights in her hair now, and who was constantly petulant about the lack of attention she was receiving despite daily phone calls and weekly visits. My own mother is famous for various quotable quotes from my childhood, including "It's a dog eat dog world, get used to it" and "you look okay when you're fixed up" and "you think we're the Waltons -- well we're not." For those too young to know what the Waltons might be, it was a television show about dirt poor southerners in the Depression who nonetheless got along and loved each other deeply. Despite poverty they were a blissfully happy family. What a fairy tale! Interestingly, old age and forgetfulness has led my mother to query "I am not sure why my children don't come for Christmas, I always thought of us as being like the Waltons." Another girlfriend, daughter of a harsh mom, always said there was no way Madonna could be Madonna if her mom were still alive. That's worth pondering.
That said, the cold splash of water that was often my mother's advice or input sometimes had exactly the right effect. She could in a comment, something like "oh for god's sake", take the air out of my adolescent and neurotic horrors and make them manageable. She was kind of a checkpoint. If she thought no biggie, no biggie it is. I far prefer this to someone who joins in the madness to help sort it out -- this is the style of another friend's mother who is constantly nattering and worrying and fussing that her granddaughter seems unfriendly and what's going on in her mind and should we call a doctor. The granddaughter is adolescent and suffers age-appropriate moodiness, so what if she doesn't want to hang with an old lady. I want to scream at this woman, "It's a dog eat dog world, get over it!!" One of the nicest things about an ex of mine is that when I was upset about stuff, like being hideous and deformed or something, he'd listen, clearly drift off into a reverie about some football game or errand he might have to attend to, and then say in a perfectly pleasant tone: "oh shut up you dreary bitch" and instantly I was laughing and felt entirely better.
We believe, though, that we should have constant approval from our mother and mine was of the view, well, you know her world view as stated above but essentially, "I don't want to send you in the world thinking you're amazing so that the world can shoot you down". In protecting us from that eventuality, she often made even home seem a tad scary.
The other day I was whinging about fatness and my colleague, in frustration or just to shut me up so he could get back to work actually turned around and took a look at the lamentable legs in question. "It's not so much that you're fat as your pants are too tight" he said, totally misunderstanding the intended effect of the outfit. As I freaked with all kinds of sputtering "WHAT?!" comments, he quickly wrote a number on a piece of paper and said "Hey, I think you are an 8.5 despite anything you are wearing." EIGHT POINT FIVE??? The attack on his poor psyche continued, despite "What, that's a good score!" and so on. He could not understand that I don't want truth from my friends, I want consoling. I want "no, actually, have you lost weight?" and "wow, you're hot, you are a 14 out of ten."
Poor lad could not understand that truth is not intrinsically valuable, truth is actually of no use. If I wanted truth I could look in the mirror. If I wanted truth, I could call my mother.
What we want is the warm bath of approval, from the only one on earth whose approval we crave and the only one who can actually make us believe it. Interesting that even the cleverest and most talented among us struggle for and don't receive it.
Read this, from the Times:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3842502.ece
"Michel Houellebecq is a literary icon whose novels have been acclaimed by critics as the cruel illumination of a troubled era.
But France's most celebrated and controversial contemporary author could be pushed off his pinnacle following an astonishingly vitriolic attack from a critic with a unique insight into his oeuvre.
She is his mother - and she is threatening to knock his teeth out with her walking stick if he mentions her again in one of his works.
In a book of her own to be published next week, Lucie Ceccaldi depicts the cult writer as an untalented social climber whose ego is only matched by his dishonesty. "
And oh, she does go on:
" “This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame,” Mrs Ceccaldi, 83, writes in L'Innocente, an autobiography."
Seems he started it, according to her. See, he wrote a book in which a despicable character called Ceccaldi abandonned her kids and took off to have sex in a sex community on the Riviera.
He could at least have changed the name I suppose.
The mother of imagination is a warm and soft place to go to be told that everything is going to be alright, you are just fine, you are wonderful, you are everything you hope you are. The maternal instinct, we are told, is an instinct, that it automatically kicks in and swathes progeny in the warm glow of unstinting love and approval.
Would that this were so. "Mother" is one of the enduring myths of civilization but in fact, if we were to look at the facts and the writing on the wall, that instinct kicks in intermittently and relatively infrequently.
My view may be warped by years of crime reporting where I was daily astonished by mothers who backed their abusive husbands versus supporting their sexually abused daughters; who stood by as fathers shook their babies to death or frankly, shook them themselves; who weekly participated in the shocking physical and emotional abuse of their own children. It always interested me that so long as there was a man to blame the courts would punish him more harshly, giving more prison time to him than the mother when in fact, to my way of thinking anyway, it is SHE who is further against nature. But the myth is so prevalent that even crusty judges cannot quite believe clear evidence and therefore mommy mustn't really have been entirely to blame.
But my view is also influenced by my circle of friends -- I have just one acquaintance who says she has the best mother on earth and who turns to her mother for love and support when she's feeling the world is against her. The rest of us have a slightly more distant relationship. Another of my friends has a mother who asked her if she were putting grey highlights in her hair now, and who was constantly petulant about the lack of attention she was receiving despite daily phone calls and weekly visits. My own mother is famous for various quotable quotes from my childhood, including "It's a dog eat dog world, get used to it" and "you look okay when you're fixed up" and "you think we're the Waltons -- well we're not." For those too young to know what the Waltons might be, it was a television show about dirt poor southerners in the Depression who nonetheless got along and loved each other deeply. Despite poverty they were a blissfully happy family. What a fairy tale! Interestingly, old age and forgetfulness has led my mother to query "I am not sure why my children don't come for Christmas, I always thought of us as being like the Waltons." Another girlfriend, daughter of a harsh mom, always said there was no way Madonna could be Madonna if her mom were still alive. That's worth pondering.
That said, the cold splash of water that was often my mother's advice or input sometimes had exactly the right effect. She could in a comment, something like "oh for god's sake", take the air out of my adolescent and neurotic horrors and make them manageable. She was kind of a checkpoint. If she thought no biggie, no biggie it is. I far prefer this to someone who joins in the madness to help sort it out -- this is the style of another friend's mother who is constantly nattering and worrying and fussing that her granddaughter seems unfriendly and what's going on in her mind and should we call a doctor. The granddaughter is adolescent and suffers age-appropriate moodiness, so what if she doesn't want to hang with an old lady. I want to scream at this woman, "It's a dog eat dog world, get over it!!" One of the nicest things about an ex of mine is that when I was upset about stuff, like being hideous and deformed or something, he'd listen, clearly drift off into a reverie about some football game or errand he might have to attend to, and then say in a perfectly pleasant tone: "oh shut up you dreary bitch" and instantly I was laughing and felt entirely better.
We believe, though, that we should have constant approval from our mother and mine was of the view, well, you know her world view as stated above but essentially, "I don't want to send you in the world thinking you're amazing so that the world can shoot you down". In protecting us from that eventuality, she often made even home seem a tad scary.
The other day I was whinging about fatness and my colleague, in frustration or just to shut me up so he could get back to work actually turned around and took a look at the lamentable legs in question. "It's not so much that you're fat as your pants are too tight" he said, totally misunderstanding the intended effect of the outfit. As I freaked with all kinds of sputtering "WHAT?!" comments, he quickly wrote a number on a piece of paper and said "Hey, I think you are an 8.5 despite anything you are wearing." EIGHT POINT FIVE??? The attack on his poor psyche continued, despite "What, that's a good score!" and so on. He could not understand that I don't want truth from my friends, I want consoling. I want "no, actually, have you lost weight?" and "wow, you're hot, you are a 14 out of ten."
Poor lad could not understand that truth is not intrinsically valuable, truth is actually of no use. If I wanted truth I could look in the mirror. If I wanted truth, I could call my mother.
What we want is the warm bath of approval, from the only one on earth whose approval we crave and the only one who can actually make us believe it. Interesting that even the cleverest and most talented among us struggle for and don't receive it.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Petite Anglaise
There is a minute sub-genre of chick lit that I like very much. Let's call it "how to be French". Everyone should want to be French I think, and happily there are a number of authors who feel the same way.
So. We loved Entre Nous - about releasing the inner French girl, and How To Be Impossibly French with loads of quotes and advice from Ines de la Fressange and others. There are books on the French by Edith Wharton and of course Gertrude Stein, too, but let's not get too serious about this. The books on "how to dress like a French woman" are almost universally disappointing and outdated. This is a very, very mini sub-genre as I mentioned.
The newest recruit, currently clocking at something like 200,000th on the Amazon best seller list, is Petite Anglaise, about a British woman and Francophile, moves to Paris, has a baby whom she calls Tadpole, and lives with a husband she names Mr. Frog. Not very nice, that Froggy bit but it's her call.
I should love this book, which is both memoir and a brief history of blogging. The author, Catherine Sanderson, started a blog about being an English girl in Paris a long time ago, (well, long in terms of online if not world history) it took off like wildfire, she rolled the experience into this book.
The memoir is also about how to lose a husband by blogging.
Sadly Catherine is as annoying as the woman who wrote Eat Pray Love.
The mini genre emerging in chick lit is, then, something along the lines of "how self absorbed can I be without you realizing it and throwing the book against the wall?" Or, hitting "close" on the blog -- I went to the source the other day and read the latest entries on http://www.petiteanglaise.com/ where Catherine gets accolades from dozens of commentators on her daughter Tadpole's prowess with a Sharpie, on how clever/cute is the kid, on how lovely life sounds with The Boy (the new man, after Mr. Frog was dispatched) and so on. I guess this is blogging at its best -- the minutiae of the quotidien which we can all relate to and admire. Certainly Catherine admires her own self and what a good mommy she is. Why, she feels really BAD when Tadpole is going off to the grandparents, and is charmed when Tadpole says "it's okay mommy, you'll have The Boy to play with."
Dear god.
But, art follows life follows art.
A good friend of mine recently found himself at a dinner party, seated next to a young woman with a couple of kids. He didn't realize that said mom was an executive VP/creative director of a huge, multi-billion-dollar empire. And why would he know that? All the talk at the dinner table was of the vacation just taken or the vacation about to be taken; plus kids. In fact, the woman didn't become animated or engaged until my friend in desperation launched a question of his own: "So, with the children, the birthdays, uhm, do you give presents to ALL the kids or just the birthday child?"
I'm not saying that this woman needed to talk about work. I am suggesting that being where she is in life, coming from a family of astute art collectors and philanthropists, and being an industry leader, there might have been something......interesting...... to offer a conversation.
It is me who is out of synch, obviously. Catherine's blog is very, very popular and you, my friends, are rare.
Ah, maybe this is all too harsh. Is it deep and profound to love to read books about being something you are not? Hardly.
Though every book, in its way, offers at least the possibility of emerging, after the last page, as something you were not. Something better.
A book or a blog that is really and truly just about me the glorious me me just as I am me me me stands as a failure of imagination. Cute as you and your kid may be.
So. We loved Entre Nous - about releasing the inner French girl, and How To Be Impossibly French with loads of quotes and advice from Ines de la Fressange and others. There are books on the French by Edith Wharton and of course Gertrude Stein, too, but let's not get too serious about this. The books on "how to dress like a French woman" are almost universally disappointing and outdated. This is a very, very mini sub-genre as I mentioned.
The newest recruit, currently clocking at something like 200,000th on the Amazon best seller list, is Petite Anglaise, about a British woman and Francophile, moves to Paris, has a baby whom she calls Tadpole, and lives with a husband she names Mr. Frog. Not very nice, that Froggy bit but it's her call.
I should love this book, which is both memoir and a brief history of blogging. The author, Catherine Sanderson, started a blog about being an English girl in Paris a long time ago, (well, long in terms of online if not world history) it took off like wildfire, she rolled the experience into this book.
The memoir is also about how to lose a husband by blogging.
Sadly Catherine is as annoying as the woman who wrote Eat Pray Love.
The mini genre emerging in chick lit is, then, something along the lines of "how self absorbed can I be without you realizing it and throwing the book against the wall?" Or, hitting "close" on the blog -- I went to the source the other day and read the latest entries on http://www.petiteanglaise.com/ where Catherine gets accolades from dozens of commentators on her daughter Tadpole's prowess with a Sharpie, on how clever/cute is the kid, on how lovely life sounds with The Boy (the new man, after Mr. Frog was dispatched) and so on. I guess this is blogging at its best -- the minutiae of the quotidien which we can all relate to and admire. Certainly Catherine admires her own self and what a good mommy she is. Why, she feels really BAD when Tadpole is going off to the grandparents, and is charmed when Tadpole says "it's okay mommy, you'll have The Boy to play with."
Dear god.
But, art follows life follows art.
A good friend of mine recently found himself at a dinner party, seated next to a young woman with a couple of kids. He didn't realize that said mom was an executive VP/creative director of a huge, multi-billion-dollar empire. And why would he know that? All the talk at the dinner table was of the vacation just taken or the vacation about to be taken; plus kids. In fact, the woman didn't become animated or engaged until my friend in desperation launched a question of his own: "So, with the children, the birthdays, uhm, do you give presents to ALL the kids or just the birthday child?"
I'm not saying that this woman needed to talk about work. I am suggesting that being where she is in life, coming from a family of astute art collectors and philanthropists, and being an industry leader, there might have been something......interesting...... to offer a conversation.
It is me who is out of synch, obviously. Catherine's blog is very, very popular and you, my friends, are rare.
Ah, maybe this is all too harsh. Is it deep and profound to love to read books about being something you are not? Hardly.
Though every book, in its way, offers at least the possibility of emerging, after the last page, as something you were not. Something better.
A book or a blog that is really and truly just about me the glorious me me just as I am me me me stands as a failure of imagination. Cute as you and your kid may be.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Other stories
I say this often but let that not prevent me from saying it again: I would not be able to attend my own dream dinner party.
Martin Amis would be there, and so would Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott; AA Gill would attend and I'd be horrified to hear the next day what he thought of the ambiance and food; maybe Diana Vreeland would show up and certainly Ines de la Fressange, meaning that no matter what I chose to WEAR to the party, I'd be wrong; Johnny Depp might be there but perhaps the dining room is not quite where we want him; I think maybe Ryan Adams would show up for a drink surprisingly enough, he's great fun at a party and I know that for certain.
Another person who really should come over is David Remnick. A Pulitzer-prize winning author, terrific writer (these two things, Pulitzer winner and great writer are not always the same thing) and editor of the New Yorker he is a guy of whom one of my more clever friends says "if you read anything, read Remnick."
So imagine how thrilled I was to hear that another friend was actually going to a cocktail party chez Remnick!
My friend Jack was given explicit instructions to be my avid emissary, to take note of food, drink, company, interiors, books, art, plants (if any), fashion (who wore what, specifically Rem and wife). He asked if I thought it would be wrong if he took pictures (I said yes but maybe not with the phone) or wore a wire (tough call, that -- I was very tempted and am lousy at turning back temptation).
Jack did a pretty good job though there was no word on the contents of the cabinets and drawers in the loo. Perhaps he didn't go to the loo. Or, perhaps, being a guy, he didn't figure out how to get to the real one and not the pristine and anemic one meant for guests.
It was with great delight that I read Jack's diary notes on the evening as it unravelled. And unravel it did, just a bit, when Jack's date for the event observed slightly loudly (champagne has that effect on me too) that Sir David was spending a great deal of time in a close tete a tete with a very pretty, nubile young woman. Said comment alerted the wife.
Here are snippets from the story Jack sent:
"Spent most of Saturday plotting what to wear. Nancy (his pal) said costumes. Met at Felix Café and immediately riffed the ideas of a fox stole and a king’s jewel-encrusted scepter. The fox was to have been killed in the Royal Hunt at Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk estate, and the scepter was that royal touch that kept that nasty critter in line. That was our story and we were sticking to it.
The fox stole was ordered on e-Bay and never arrived until after the fact. The scepter was ordered from a costumer in Albany, arrived on time, but resembled more Tinkerbell’s wand than anything fit for a king. It will now be used by Jack as he looks at creative work. He will point to the best work with the wand.
Nancy and Jack were both very nervous in the final few hours leading up to the event. No fox for the fox, had to settle for Minky, which proved to be the right call. The fox would simply have been too garish, to in-your-face, too much road kill for one girl to pull off.
Nancy wore a fab black wool dress onto which Minky was sewn. A great pelt laid out across her left shoulder. He had very off-putting glass eyes. Those have to go. The dress was set off by a pair of stunning black lace tights that cost as much as Nancy’s $200 hair coloring and blow dry. Ahem.
Jack wore full-on Etro, as dandy as was reasonable. Vivid striped shirt with purple, pink and navy floral tie, and accompanying pocket puff. Pin-striped suit. The coup de grace was his carved wooden Fox head cane from France. Just the thing to keep the mink in line, a mink we should add that was trapped by Nance’s dad when he worked the trap lines for HBC many moons ago. Problem was he snared the beast on hallowed Indian burial ground, thus imbuing Minky with a supernatural spirit. He has been known to come alive at parties and rip into the jugular of the host. Fox Head was on hand as a bludgeoning instrument, as seen on CSI New York.
Nancy picked up Jack at his place just down the road from Remnick in UWS. A glorious, sunny spring evening. On tenterhooks they left the taxi, took a few snaps in front of the house, and, after a limping lesson to make the cane seem more authentic, they ventured in.
A small group of people waited for an elevator. A burly prick of a businessman in a J.C. Penny suit glowered at Jack’s cane and poor Minky. He did not approve. We were clearly not the kind of people he wanted in his building.
In the elevator Jack tested Nancy’s resolve and acumen in telling the HBC trap line story by asking her in front of the others if her father had ever worked traps north of the 60th parallel. To his surprise she informed him that he had laid out a series of traps along the northern frontier, a kind of early warning system to keep out foot-bound Russians, pre-Norad. At least one person in the crowded elevator laughed. It was Jack.
We left the elevator and entered directly into David’s home. A small vestibule at first, then a larger receiving room in which we were, well, received by David Remnick and Drew Schutte themselves. Drew is the new publisher for whom the party was being thrown. Drew shook Jack’s hand and broke it. This was clearly a publisher with something to prove. Jack felt like sending a glancing blow with Fox Head off his temple but that would have got the party off to a dodgy start. David introduced himself to Nancy and Jack. He is tall, good looking, and for a reporter dresses quite well. Navy blazer, pale, open-necked shirt, grey trou. Drew had on a navy blazer and a bolder blue checked shirt, no tie as well. Here is the verbatim conversation that followed:
JACK: “Hi David, Jack Neary.”
DAVID: “Jack, that is one g-r-e-a-t tie.” (said with a drawn-out emphasis, a good thing)
JACK: “Thank you! We do what we can, but the real item worth noting is this fine mink here."(Jack gestures with his cane to Nancy’s black pelt.)
DAVID: “Ohhhhh.” (said admiringly)
JACK: “We are celebrating the retirement of Nancy’s father from his trap line in the far Canadian north.”
NANCY: “This was one of his first catches.”
DAVID: “What a clean catch.”
NANCY: “It was a very clean catch, some of his better work.”
DAVID: “Is this for real?” (we think he meant our story, not if the mink was real)
N & J: (in unison) “Ohhh, yeah, he was a trapper.”
DAVID: “Well, welcome, please make yourselves at home.”
Floating on a thin layer of ether we enter the drawing room."
My heavenly days, how great is that? And isn't my David sharp and charming? Actually, maybe I can't invite Jack either.
You can see why I would be a no-show at dinner.
Martin Amis would be there, and so would Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott; AA Gill would attend and I'd be horrified to hear the next day what he thought of the ambiance and food; maybe Diana Vreeland would show up and certainly Ines de la Fressange, meaning that no matter what I chose to WEAR to the party, I'd be wrong; Johnny Depp might be there but perhaps the dining room is not quite where we want him; I think maybe Ryan Adams would show up for a drink surprisingly enough, he's great fun at a party and I know that for certain.
Another person who really should come over is David Remnick. A Pulitzer-prize winning author, terrific writer (these two things, Pulitzer winner and great writer are not always the same thing) and editor of the New Yorker he is a guy of whom one of my more clever friends says "if you read anything, read Remnick."
So imagine how thrilled I was to hear that another friend was actually going to a cocktail party chez Remnick!
My friend Jack was given explicit instructions to be my avid emissary, to take note of food, drink, company, interiors, books, art, plants (if any), fashion (who wore what, specifically Rem and wife). He asked if I thought it would be wrong if he took pictures (I said yes but maybe not with the phone) or wore a wire (tough call, that -- I was very tempted and am lousy at turning back temptation).
Jack did a pretty good job though there was no word on the contents of the cabinets and drawers in the loo. Perhaps he didn't go to the loo. Or, perhaps, being a guy, he didn't figure out how to get to the real one and not the pristine and anemic one meant for guests.
It was with great delight that I read Jack's diary notes on the evening as it unravelled. And unravel it did, just a bit, when Jack's date for the event observed slightly loudly (champagne has that effect on me too) that Sir David was spending a great deal of time in a close tete a tete with a very pretty, nubile young woman. Said comment alerted the wife.
Here are snippets from the story Jack sent:
"Spent most of Saturday plotting what to wear. Nancy (his pal) said costumes. Met at Felix Café and immediately riffed the ideas of a fox stole and a king’s jewel-encrusted scepter. The fox was to have been killed in the Royal Hunt at Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk estate, and the scepter was that royal touch that kept that nasty critter in line. That was our story and we were sticking to it.
The fox stole was ordered on e-Bay and never arrived until after the fact. The scepter was ordered from a costumer in Albany, arrived on time, but resembled more Tinkerbell’s wand than anything fit for a king. It will now be used by Jack as he looks at creative work. He will point to the best work with the wand.
Nancy and Jack were both very nervous in the final few hours leading up to the event. No fox for the fox, had to settle for Minky, which proved to be the right call. The fox would simply have been too garish, to in-your-face, too much road kill for one girl to pull off.
Nancy wore a fab black wool dress onto which Minky was sewn. A great pelt laid out across her left shoulder. He had very off-putting glass eyes. Those have to go. The dress was set off by a pair of stunning black lace tights that cost as much as Nancy’s $200 hair coloring and blow dry. Ahem.
Jack wore full-on Etro, as dandy as was reasonable. Vivid striped shirt with purple, pink and navy floral tie, and accompanying pocket puff. Pin-striped suit. The coup de grace was his carved wooden Fox head cane from France. Just the thing to keep the mink in line, a mink we should add that was trapped by Nance’s dad when he worked the trap lines for HBC many moons ago. Problem was he snared the beast on hallowed Indian burial ground, thus imbuing Minky with a supernatural spirit. He has been known to come alive at parties and rip into the jugular of the host. Fox Head was on hand as a bludgeoning instrument, as seen on CSI New York.
Nancy picked up Jack at his place just down the road from Remnick in UWS. A glorious, sunny spring evening. On tenterhooks they left the taxi, took a few snaps in front of the house, and, after a limping lesson to make the cane seem more authentic, they ventured in.
A small group of people waited for an elevator. A burly prick of a businessman in a J.C. Penny suit glowered at Jack’s cane and poor Minky. He did not approve. We were clearly not the kind of people he wanted in his building.
In the elevator Jack tested Nancy’s resolve and acumen in telling the HBC trap line story by asking her in front of the others if her father had ever worked traps north of the 60th parallel. To his surprise she informed him that he had laid out a series of traps along the northern frontier, a kind of early warning system to keep out foot-bound Russians, pre-Norad. At least one person in the crowded elevator laughed. It was Jack.
We left the elevator and entered directly into David’s home. A small vestibule at first, then a larger receiving room in which we were, well, received by David Remnick and Drew Schutte themselves. Drew is the new publisher for whom the party was being thrown. Drew shook Jack’s hand and broke it. This was clearly a publisher with something to prove. Jack felt like sending a glancing blow with Fox Head off his temple but that would have got the party off to a dodgy start. David introduced himself to Nancy and Jack. He is tall, good looking, and for a reporter dresses quite well. Navy blazer, pale, open-necked shirt, grey trou. Drew had on a navy blazer and a bolder blue checked shirt, no tie as well. Here is the verbatim conversation that followed:
JACK: “Hi David, Jack Neary.”
DAVID: “Jack, that is one g-r-e-a-t tie.” (said with a drawn-out emphasis, a good thing)
JACK: “Thank you! We do what we can, but the real item worth noting is this fine mink here."(Jack gestures with his cane to Nancy’s black pelt.)
DAVID: “Ohhhhh.” (said admiringly)
JACK: “We are celebrating the retirement of Nancy’s father from his trap line in the far Canadian north.”
NANCY: “This was one of his first catches.”
DAVID: “What a clean catch.”
NANCY: “It was a very clean catch, some of his better work.”
DAVID: “Is this for real?” (we think he meant our story, not if the mink was real)
N & J: (in unison) “Ohhh, yeah, he was a trapper.”
DAVID: “Well, welcome, please make yourselves at home.”
Floating on a thin layer of ether we enter the drawing room."
My heavenly days, how great is that? And isn't my David sharp and charming? Actually, maybe I can't invite Jack either.
You can see why I would be a no-show at dinner.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The stories you tell, the stories you tell yourself.
Booktherapy is built on the idea that a book can be therapeutic, can tell you what you need to know when you needed to know it, that a good book can nourish your soul.
What is a book, any book, but a story?
So, this is a story I was told, it is not yet a book but I understand it will be. It affected me deeply.
A friend of mine recently had lunch with a woman he has known a long time, a woman who was his right hand and helper in projects that kept his family in ribbons, bows and private school.
This woman is luscious apparently, well known and appreciated for her heavy auburn hair and her delicious curvy and milky body, specifically her glorious breasts, now removed.
Her sister has died of breast cancer and she is fighting same but at lunch, in the way of some brave soldiers against this insidious and silent enemy, she is jaunty and optimistic and actually down to earth funny about it all. Cancer has a focusing effect on some people. As a brilliant lawyer used to say "this will knock the birdshit off the pump handle" -- suddenly you are faced with your own body warring against itself and the truth that we live only in the present, we only know we have this very minute, becomes utterly tangible. Some die of this idea, some thrive with it.
This woman, on her way to her radical mastectomy, asked for one last look and popped her top to take a view of the girls before being wheeled into the killing room, the room of their demise. Her glorious hair is sacrificed to chemo, and much of what you could have thought was her is now gone. What is truly her is shining through.
That last request, the request to take a last look at her breasts is an idea that has intrigued me since I heard it.
I have lost close friends and relatives to cancer, I have a gorgeous painting -- macabre to most people, utterly beautiful to me -- that is an ode to cancer and its defining effect, how it renders us merely a casing, soul against a recalcitrant and unruly body that suddenly turns enemy. Cancer hovers very near to all of us, the lucky among us stand near and not within its grip.
Cancer is the body turning against itself and I think this is the core of why this story has so gripped me.
I have fought against my own body all my life. After an eating disorder, not yet well but not the weight of a child either, I nearly walked with my nose in the air, so horrified was I to catch a glimpse of my own leg, thigh, belly, arms. Today it would seem that to some I am curvy or at the very least "athletic" -- shop girls often admonish me when I am freaking in front of the mirror: "Love your curves! men love curves!" I am not suggesting I have a sexy body but strangers call me so. To me, this body is something to fight against.
This woman revelled in her sexiness and is sorry to see it gone. But not too sorry, it's more like nostalgia, there are more important things now. One of my friends, a wild woman, had a couple of kids and thereafter various things sagged and dropped and she said "oh well, my body served me well, I had a lot of fun with it at the time" -- a perfectly healthy approach I think.
What struck me is this. Would I have wanted to say goodbye to these old friends? I wonder if I would miss them if they were gone. I don't want to sound more shallow than I have to, but they have often gotten in the way.
What this woman has shown me in high relief is that you can turn against your body or your body can turn against you. The salvation is being at peace with the whole.
What is a book, any book, but a story?
So, this is a story I was told, it is not yet a book but I understand it will be. It affected me deeply.
A friend of mine recently had lunch with a woman he has known a long time, a woman who was his right hand and helper in projects that kept his family in ribbons, bows and private school.
This woman is luscious apparently, well known and appreciated for her heavy auburn hair and her delicious curvy and milky body, specifically her glorious breasts, now removed.
Her sister has died of breast cancer and she is fighting same but at lunch, in the way of some brave soldiers against this insidious and silent enemy, she is jaunty and optimistic and actually down to earth funny about it all. Cancer has a focusing effect on some people. As a brilliant lawyer used to say "this will knock the birdshit off the pump handle" -- suddenly you are faced with your own body warring against itself and the truth that we live only in the present, we only know we have this very minute, becomes utterly tangible. Some die of this idea, some thrive with it.
This woman, on her way to her radical mastectomy, asked for one last look and popped her top to take a view of the girls before being wheeled into the killing room, the room of their demise. Her glorious hair is sacrificed to chemo, and much of what you could have thought was her is now gone. What is truly her is shining through.
That last request, the request to take a last look at her breasts is an idea that has intrigued me since I heard it.
I have lost close friends and relatives to cancer, I have a gorgeous painting -- macabre to most people, utterly beautiful to me -- that is an ode to cancer and its defining effect, how it renders us merely a casing, soul against a recalcitrant and unruly body that suddenly turns enemy. Cancer hovers very near to all of us, the lucky among us stand near and not within its grip.
Cancer is the body turning against itself and I think this is the core of why this story has so gripped me.
I have fought against my own body all my life. After an eating disorder, not yet well but not the weight of a child either, I nearly walked with my nose in the air, so horrified was I to catch a glimpse of my own leg, thigh, belly, arms. Today it would seem that to some I am curvy or at the very least "athletic" -- shop girls often admonish me when I am freaking in front of the mirror: "Love your curves! men love curves!" I am not suggesting I have a sexy body but strangers call me so. To me, this body is something to fight against.
This woman revelled in her sexiness and is sorry to see it gone. But not too sorry, it's more like nostalgia, there are more important things now. One of my friends, a wild woman, had a couple of kids and thereafter various things sagged and dropped and she said "oh well, my body served me well, I had a lot of fun with it at the time" -- a perfectly healthy approach I think.
What struck me is this. Would I have wanted to say goodbye to these old friends? I wonder if I would miss them if they were gone. I don't want to sound more shallow than I have to, but they have often gotten in the way.
What this woman has shown me in high relief is that you can turn against your body or your body can turn against you. The salvation is being at peace with the whole.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
On writing well
In journalism school they teach you that Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is one of the best stories ever written. Why? Because it was written in spite of Frank Sinatra, he might say TO spite Frank Sinatra and the story of the story is, Gay Talese could not no how get an interview with Frankie. So he interviewed everyone else and wrote a story about Frank anyway, and it was more revealing than anything that Frank himself could or would have divulged.
Unauthorized biographies should be a lot like this and often are not. Magazine stories should be like this too but nowadays there's no celeb worth her fairy dust who would turn down an interview, so the need never arises.
Or does it?
Celebrity is a science now, for those who have that particular DNA. Having interviewed a few famous people myself I can say that they quickly develop a veneer of .... veneer, actually. It is virtually impossible to get beneath it. Celebrity culture is such, too, that the Faustian deal is never risked, not many writers would dare irritate the publicist (if not the celeb) who might provide the big "Get" later on and down the road.
So, we can only ever see what we are supposed to see.
Or does it?
Celebrity is a science now, for those who have that particular DNA. Having interviewed a few famous people myself I can say that they quickly develop a veneer of .... veneer, actually. It is virtually impossible to get beneath it. Celebrity culture is such, too, that the Faustian deal is never risked, not many writers would dare irritate the publicist (if not the celeb) who might provide the big "Get" later on and down the road.
So, we can only ever see what we are supposed to see.
Imagine then the delight of reading the profile of Madonna in the May issue of Vanity Fair. Madonna, we are given to understand, is a master controller. It's always all about her, with her you get what you get, she sets the agenda and the tone, she is the centre of the universe and the universe is a damn fine place to be...this is what we glean from the lifetime she has spent in front of us. In the fascinating film, Truth or Dare, the filmmaker asks her (as I remember it) if she'd like to do something or other off-camera. Her then boyfriend Warren Beatty, no slouch of a celeb himself, says "she doesn't want to LIVE off camera" -- and you'd have to say he'd know.
I've seen many interviews with Madonna and except for the strange chat with David Letterman where she giggled and cussed and appeared out of control (see the first video above...this is where we learned that if you pee in the shower, you can prevent athlete's foot -- an utterance that made prissy Letterman blanch) she puts the boring into bored so calculated is she. I suspect that she controls her own facade even with her husband and why not, I suppose -- reality can be so messy, and ordinary. In the current case, the VF writer, Rich Cohen, was clearly getting vintage Madonna, a full serving of banalities and key messages with not a hair or a breath out of place.
And so he wrote his own story. Cohen is not Talese, but this story is nonetheless a solid read and far more revealing that Madonna would have otherwise allowed.
And the pictures are amazing. She really is an image.
Friday, April 11, 2008
The Current Cinema
Every once in a while you come across a startlingly fine sentence, one that brings you up short and makes you pay new attention.
I'm not saying anything about dogs, but guess which sentence appealed so much in this excerpt from a review of Funny Games, found in the New Yorker:
And so, like shackled prisoners trudging back to the rack and the thumbscrews, we start once more, with an overhead view of a family car pulling a boat on a trailer along rural roads. The family comprises George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), their ten-year-old son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog—a lolloping golden retriever named Lucky. If there is one lesson we learn from “Funny Games,” it is not that malice is rooted deep in our soiled nature, or that capitalist society has made an unhealthy fetish of violence, but simply that, if you want to avoid such unpleasantness, ditch the retriever. Everything that happens to George and Ann could have been avoided with a pair of Dobermans, or an underfed Scottish terrier with a working knowledge of Nietzsche.
Read the whole good thing:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/03/17/080317crci_cinema_lane
I'm not saying anything about dogs, but guess which sentence appealed so much in this excerpt from a review of Funny Games, found in the New Yorker:
And so, like shackled prisoners trudging back to the rack and the thumbscrews, we start once more, with an overhead view of a family car pulling a boat on a trailer along rural roads. The family comprises George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), their ten-year-old son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog—a lolloping golden retriever named Lucky. If there is one lesson we learn from “Funny Games,” it is not that malice is rooted deep in our soiled nature, or that capitalist society has made an unhealthy fetish of violence, but simply that, if you want to avoid such unpleasantness, ditch the retriever. Everything that happens to George and Ann could have been avoided with a pair of Dobermans, or an underfed Scottish terrier with a working knowledge of Nietzsche.
Read the whole good thing:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/03/17/080317crci_cinema_lane
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Men Who Read
A recent essay in the New York Times suggested that a woman was trying to justify her recent dumping of some guy by saying "Can you believe it? He hadn't even heard of Pushkin!", vainly attempting to use literary taste as a measure of compatibility.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ex=1207627200&en=508fc64c5777d5b0&ei=5070&emc=eta1
If this were truly the measure, I would be a virgin. I am decidedly not.
I have never seen a man actually finish a book. I've heard many TALK about books; one ex TALKED about his book irritatingly and incesssantly before falling into a Van Winkle slumber. "Oh my god this is the BEST book I've ever read!" he'd say as I was trying to read my own. "Best! Oh wow this is funny can I read it to you?!" "The insights! SO right ON!" .... Thunk. End of. No more need of the best book of his life. Ever.
Another ex looked very bookish, being tall and slim with that sort of schoolboy style and the narrow glasses all the young men seem to wear. We melded our bookshelves briefly before he moved back out, so I knew he'd at least made a stab at purchasing books but to my best recollection I remember the sound of hockey games on the television and much discussion about movies but, again, no books.
In fairness I have been known to fake book knowledge as well, much like the time I waxed poetic about the crazy filmography and use of colour in Zukerbaby, obviously a German flick, while talking to one of my country's biggest theatre impressarios at a party. I'd seen the trailer and extrapolated -- I don't think he'd gone much further either.
So while I can CALL something "Dickensian" and while I do love every word I've read of Great Expectations and even today referred to Havana as "Miss Havisham's city", I have never completed a Dickens novel. Proust has something to do with remembering a pastry. Mrs. Dalloway did a few things one day, Ulysses and Odysseus are the same guy, and I once had to ask the spelling of Sissinghurst when taking a recommendation for a good florist. We all do it. Fake it I mean.
Only in at least this ONE instance, the bigger fakers are men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ex=1207627200&en=508fc64c5777d5b0&ei=5070&emc=eta1
If this were truly the measure, I would be a virgin. I am decidedly not.
I have never seen a man actually finish a book. I've heard many TALK about books; one ex TALKED about his book irritatingly and incesssantly before falling into a Van Winkle slumber. "Oh my god this is the BEST book I've ever read!" he'd say as I was trying to read my own. "Best! Oh wow this is funny can I read it to you?!" "The insights! SO right ON!" .... Thunk. End of. No more need of the best book of his life. Ever.
Another ex looked very bookish, being tall and slim with that sort of schoolboy style and the narrow glasses all the young men seem to wear. We melded our bookshelves briefly before he moved back out, so I knew he'd at least made a stab at purchasing books but to my best recollection I remember the sound of hockey games on the television and much discussion about movies but, again, no books.
In fairness I have been known to fake book knowledge as well, much like the time I waxed poetic about the crazy filmography and use of colour in Zukerbaby, obviously a German flick, while talking to one of my country's biggest theatre impressarios at a party. I'd seen the trailer and extrapolated -- I don't think he'd gone much further either.
So while I can CALL something "Dickensian" and while I do love every word I've read of Great Expectations and even today referred to Havana as "Miss Havisham's city", I have never completed a Dickens novel. Proust has something to do with remembering a pastry. Mrs. Dalloway did a few things one day, Ulysses and Odysseus are the same guy, and I once had to ask the spelling of Sissinghurst when taking a recommendation for a good florist. We all do it. Fake it I mean.
Only in at least this ONE instance, the bigger fakers are men.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
From M, on What Was Lost
Thanks for the great read. Was so happy Kate fell to her death. That's a strange thing to say but I felt afeared the whole book through that I would be reading "lovely bones." So a big thank you goes out to Catherine Oflynn for her refined craft.
What's fish paste?
M
What's fish paste?
M
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
The Innocent Man
Being stuck on a plane for ten hours within 24 is my version of an inner circle of hell. Thus I purchased a total of four emergency books, all the grey bricks of mass market, as a possible opiate -- the real book was locked in the checked luggage and too heavy in all ways for carry-on, and the spectre of being forced to watch the bad movie or reading the card with the safety features was just too formidable.
For emergency reading I choose only murder mysteries, as they are the most reliable and you cannot take a chance on being bored to tears by some "literary fiction" experiment. As well, in an emergency run through the airport bookstore, it's best to buy in bulk, or at least buy two books, just in case.
The fascinating-sounding Ruth Rendell began to have the eery air of familiarity quite early on, and then I could predict the next big clue, and then realized I'd already read it. The next, an Ian Rankin, was just too dull -- it seemed to have something of a political twist to it, which was just tedious.
Imagine my delight, then, to embark upon The Innocent Man by John Grisham. I'd forgotten all the hoopla about this book and began reading it as though it were any old murder mystery and noticed that its tone was that of an extremely well written legal brief. What a good idea! I thought, what elegance and restraint this shows.
Only later did I tumble to the fact that this is THE book, the one quite extensively reviewed and commented upon as Grisham's departure into what can be called True Crime but is better simply thought of as a terrifically well-researched look at gross injustice.
What a service he has done. What a shocking story. And sadly, at the same time, how commonplace -- you can swap out the names and places and be as easily reading the very excellent Redrum the Innocent, Kirk Makin's investigation and revelation of a similar miscarriage. In a small town it does not pay to be a bit weird, and never underestimate the sheer bloody-mindedness of bad cops.
How wonderful that Grisham should have turned his fine mind and huge audience to spotlight the terrible failures and prejudices that led a flawed but innocent man to death row.
For emergency reading I choose only murder mysteries, as they are the most reliable and you cannot take a chance on being bored to tears by some "literary fiction" experiment. As well, in an emergency run through the airport bookstore, it's best to buy in bulk, or at least buy two books, just in case.
The fascinating-sounding Ruth Rendell began to have the eery air of familiarity quite early on, and then I could predict the next big clue, and then realized I'd already read it. The next, an Ian Rankin, was just too dull -- it seemed to have something of a political twist to it, which was just tedious.
Imagine my delight, then, to embark upon The Innocent Man by John Grisham. I'd forgotten all the hoopla about this book and began reading it as though it were any old murder mystery and noticed that its tone was that of an extremely well written legal brief. What a good idea! I thought, what elegance and restraint this shows.
Only later did I tumble to the fact that this is THE book, the one quite extensively reviewed and commented upon as Grisham's departure into what can be called True Crime but is better simply thought of as a terrifically well-researched look at gross injustice.
What a service he has done. What a shocking story. And sadly, at the same time, how commonplace -- you can swap out the names and places and be as easily reading the very excellent Redrum the Innocent, Kirk Makin's investigation and revelation of a similar miscarriage. In a small town it does not pay to be a bit weird, and never underestimate the sheer bloody-mindedness of bad cops.
How wonderful that Grisham should have turned his fine mind and huge audience to spotlight the terrible failures and prejudices that led a flawed but innocent man to death row.
Monday, February 25, 2008
What Was Lost....or, Vogue
What Was Lost is one of those books you will be hearing about everywhere, as it has enjoyed one of the debuts that seem to happen with greater and greater frequency: a hitherto unpublished and very young author comes out of the gate at a gallop, wins or is shortlisted for things her elders can only dream of, and the book soars to the top of bestseller lists worldwide before being optioned by Miramax (if that's what Miramax does) or Plan B, the production company begun by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Plan B options all the good books.
The story begins with a charming take on the Harriet the Spy genre, with Kate Meaney, not mean at all, junior detective. With her notebook and trusty partner Mickey in tow (Mickey being a stuffed monkey who wears a striped suit and spats) she trails suspects through the big shopping centre near her home.
Like Harriet she is sort of lonely and quite an outsider and therefore develops into an interesting, engaging and original character. Her best friend is the son of the news agent, who is really much too old to befriend a ten year old. But, he's a bit of a misfit too and friendship occurs wherever it occurs if you wouldn't mind keeping your filthy suspicions to yourself.
And then the story veers off into a tale of dead ends of all kinds, missed opportunities, missing people, the dead and deadness. Is "deadness" a word? It is certainly a feeling and it pervades the book like the smell of every shopping mall with a fast-food court.
As it turns out, Kate gives someone a life while her disappearance off the face of the earth ends many others, namely that of her friend who could never shuck the suspicion that he was involved in her vanishing. Throughout the book I was hoping that Kate somehow managed to escape the council estate she lived in, managed to disappear into a new life as any undercover junior detective should be able to do.
Heavy treading, this.
The thing is, the entropy, the vortex of same-same and the slow, imperceptible death of hope can really catch even a tiger by the tail. It is so easy to slip into a relationship that's all very nice but not very good, a job that is just a job, it is so easy to let guilt and weakness define you.
I was reading over the weekend a story about how Hillary Clinton is coping with the reality that she may very well not win the nomination despite her hard work, worthiness and determination. One thing struck me -- she is pragmatic, the story said, and knows well enough that someone has to lose but right now she's still got to keep on winning and so simply does not read or listen to anything that nay-says. She needs to keep her eye on the ball, she needs to stay optimistic.
What a practical thing to do. Simply don't let the bad stuff into your head.
And so, as an antidote to this very excellent but nonetheless heavy book I read Vogue cover to cover. Our Biggest Spring Issue Ever! Why Vogue? It is relentlessly upbeat even when it isn't -- even the sad stories about cold mothers and sensitive daughters or whatever are sort of couched. Mother and daughter are attractive and have loads of advantages -- I mean really, they're profiled in Vogue! Vogue is the home of the vitamin enriched sons and daughters of money in the bank, to re-use one of my favorite phrases, and on every page there is the assurance that everything is possible, a pretty girl can decide to design a bag and voila! she's a successful entrepreneur! You can marry a prince really and truly! You can have a glamorous-sounding job that is both truly glamorous and so are you!
Sometimes you need the fairy tales of magazines to offset the hard truths of fiction.
The story begins with a charming take on the Harriet the Spy genre, with Kate Meaney, not mean at all, junior detective. With her notebook and trusty partner Mickey in tow (Mickey being a stuffed monkey who wears a striped suit and spats) she trails suspects through the big shopping centre near her home.
Like Harriet she is sort of lonely and quite an outsider and therefore develops into an interesting, engaging and original character. Her best friend is the son of the news agent, who is really much too old to befriend a ten year old. But, he's a bit of a misfit too and friendship occurs wherever it occurs if you wouldn't mind keeping your filthy suspicions to yourself.
And then the story veers off into a tale of dead ends of all kinds, missed opportunities, missing people, the dead and deadness. Is "deadness" a word? It is certainly a feeling and it pervades the book like the smell of every shopping mall with a fast-food court.
As it turns out, Kate gives someone a life while her disappearance off the face of the earth ends many others, namely that of her friend who could never shuck the suspicion that he was involved in her vanishing. Throughout the book I was hoping that Kate somehow managed to escape the council estate she lived in, managed to disappear into a new life as any undercover junior detective should be able to do.
Heavy treading, this.
The thing is, the entropy, the vortex of same-same and the slow, imperceptible death of hope can really catch even a tiger by the tail. It is so easy to slip into a relationship that's all very nice but not very good, a job that is just a job, it is so easy to let guilt and weakness define you.
I was reading over the weekend a story about how Hillary Clinton is coping with the reality that she may very well not win the nomination despite her hard work, worthiness and determination. One thing struck me -- she is pragmatic, the story said, and knows well enough that someone has to lose but right now she's still got to keep on winning and so simply does not read or listen to anything that nay-says. She needs to keep her eye on the ball, she needs to stay optimistic.
What a practical thing to do. Simply don't let the bad stuff into your head.
And so, as an antidote to this very excellent but nonetheless heavy book I read Vogue cover to cover. Our Biggest Spring Issue Ever! Why Vogue? It is relentlessly upbeat even when it isn't -- even the sad stories about cold mothers and sensitive daughters or whatever are sort of couched. Mother and daughter are attractive and have loads of advantages -- I mean really, they're profiled in Vogue! Vogue is the home of the vitamin enriched sons and daughters of money in the bank, to re-use one of my favorite phrases, and on every page there is the assurance that everything is possible, a pretty girl can decide to design a bag and voila! she's a successful entrepreneur! You can marry a prince really and truly! You can have a glamorous-sounding job that is both truly glamorous and so are you!
Sometimes you need the fairy tales of magazines to offset the hard truths of fiction.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Then We Came to the End
Every once in a while you recognize hey, I'm marching to a different drummer. I live outside the zeitgeist. I'm not the maven on this one. Actually I just don't get it.
Such is my feeling upon completing this first novel which has won great critical acclaim, near-awards and bestseller status. So thrilled with it is its publisher that there is a run of advanced reading copies for the trade paper edition, all the better to further activate buzz from those who didn't receive the hard cover ARC. In fact, the publisher's letter on the back of this same advance reading copy alludes to The Great American Novel with comparisons to Gatsby.
Gatsby? Really?
My first crack at this book was in New York, where I was staying in a fabulous hotel in the lower east side mere steps from the Bowery Mission. The combination of the tension of the book, which is about a bunch of advertising types undergoing a series of layoffs, plus New York plus the up close and personal view of where being down and out can take you all added up to shelving it.
But so many of the great readers in my life have loved this book I felt I had to give it another go. "Get past the first 100 pages and you'll love it!" they said.
Love it I did not.
The book is written in the royal "we" but that's not annoying. It is written about a group of people so morally vacuous that diatribes about the serial numbers on "buckshelves" seems reasonable. Their collective madness and unravelling leaves little to glom on to, none of the characters seem either very nice or even very smart.
Take for example one guy who is distraught because his mistress won't commit to an abortion. "My life will be ruined" he laments -- not, "I ruined my life" by which he really means "I ruined my wife." This is a common strain in real life I admit, so perhaps kudos to the author for noticing.
Among the others of "we" are those who go to McDonald's to observe a grieving mother who cannot help but go to the ball room where her dead daughter played, in order to conjure the child. They observe but in a "can you believe it?!!" way which I am happy to say I don't recognize.
One of the best sections is about the feared head of the agency, who has made many "walk Spanish" (down the plank) to joblessness, who is terrified of the hospitals that will not cure her cancer but rather subject her to numerous humiliations before she dies. Fair enough. This cancer-addled woman loses her mind but finds that her boyfriend is capable of generous, compassionate, imaginative care of her -- really, his approach is knight on a white steed -- but then he feels he needs to tell her, lest she get the wrong impression, that while he will help through the puking and the aching and the other forms of horrible, he really has to say that there's no future for them.
How startling, how cold, how tragic to know in the face of your own mortality that no one actually loved you enough. That someone so lovely did not love you enough.
This book is devastating and that is, I suppose its beauty for sturdier souls. It has a Russian, not American, vibe -- the dispassionate reportage of moral failings strikes me as distinctly of that ilk rather than the rather grandiose and affirming Great American Novel. It is a consummate act of writing. That the author gets away with "we" so easily, and deals with 9-11 so elegantly (my pet peeve is with books that use this as a plot point -- c'mon, try harder....) and lets its characters (there is no protagonist but "we" -- kind of profound, that...) squirm in their own cheap squalor -- well, that's some good and disciplined writer.
Sadly this is not, to me anyway, an enjoyable book. Necessary, prescient, smart, maybe. But bloody hard to face.
Such is my feeling upon completing this first novel which has won great critical acclaim, near-awards and bestseller status. So thrilled with it is its publisher that there is a run of advanced reading copies for the trade paper edition, all the better to further activate buzz from those who didn't receive the hard cover ARC. In fact, the publisher's letter on the back of this same advance reading copy alludes to The Great American Novel with comparisons to Gatsby.
Gatsby? Really?
My first crack at this book was in New York, where I was staying in a fabulous hotel in the lower east side mere steps from the Bowery Mission. The combination of the tension of the book, which is about a bunch of advertising types undergoing a series of layoffs, plus New York plus the up close and personal view of where being down and out can take you all added up to shelving it.
But so many of the great readers in my life have loved this book I felt I had to give it another go. "Get past the first 100 pages and you'll love it!" they said.
Love it I did not.
The book is written in the royal "we" but that's not annoying. It is written about a group of people so morally vacuous that diatribes about the serial numbers on "buckshelves" seems reasonable. Their collective madness and unravelling leaves little to glom on to, none of the characters seem either very nice or even very smart.
Take for example one guy who is distraught because his mistress won't commit to an abortion. "My life will be ruined" he laments -- not, "I ruined my life" by which he really means "I ruined my wife." This is a common strain in real life I admit, so perhaps kudos to the author for noticing.
Among the others of "we" are those who go to McDonald's to observe a grieving mother who cannot help but go to the ball room where her dead daughter played, in order to conjure the child. They observe but in a "can you believe it?!!" way which I am happy to say I don't recognize.
One of the best sections is about the feared head of the agency, who has made many "walk Spanish" (down the plank) to joblessness, who is terrified of the hospitals that will not cure her cancer but rather subject her to numerous humiliations before she dies. Fair enough. This cancer-addled woman loses her mind but finds that her boyfriend is capable of generous, compassionate, imaginative care of her -- really, his approach is knight on a white steed -- but then he feels he needs to tell her, lest she get the wrong impression, that while he will help through the puking and the aching and the other forms of horrible, he really has to say that there's no future for them.
How startling, how cold, how tragic to know in the face of your own mortality that no one actually loved you enough. That someone so lovely did not love you enough.
This book is devastating and that is, I suppose its beauty for sturdier souls. It has a Russian, not American, vibe -- the dispassionate reportage of moral failings strikes me as distinctly of that ilk rather than the rather grandiose and affirming Great American Novel. It is a consummate act of writing. That the author gets away with "we" so easily, and deals with 9-11 so elegantly (my pet peeve is with books that use this as a plot point -- c'mon, try harder....) and lets its characters (there is no protagonist but "we" -- kind of profound, that...) squirm in their own cheap squalor -- well, that's some good and disciplined writer.
Sadly this is not, to me anyway, an enjoyable book. Necessary, prescient, smart, maybe. But bloody hard to face.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Listen to the music
Being utterly unable to focus and read anything remotely challenging I find myself in a swath of magazines, celebrity gossip and fashion websites and hidden behind a stack of otherwise utterly embarrassing Chick Lit and murder mysteries (one felt so oddly familiar I must have already read it but of course could not remember who died or why I cared). And please Harlen Coben, stop making me think you are Dennis Lehane -- I buy these Cobens only to hurl them against the wall. Cannot stand the lovable lug who stars in these and his completely boring "perky" girl next door girlfriend.
The season of hearts and flowers has, thankfully, just slid by -- the cinemas are still filled with date night Rom Coms but that will pass soon enough. Still, the season has led me back to easy-to-read, because so often read before, poetry.
I find myself drawn to the cadence and language, and the shimmer of the big ideas behind the beautiful words. Reading poetry, especially familiar poetry, is soothing and soul-feeding -- it feels like rubbing fingers against smooth and warm worry beads and is a faithful reminder that the quotidien is not all there is.
Poetry soothes as music does, holding a rhythm akin to heartbeat. Shakes up the brainwaves at the same time.
Try it. Try reading Auden, my best friend when not in the thrall of Eliot (I did say it's great to return to the familiar) or even the Sonnets: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds".... Okay, so you grew tired of this one after all those weddings of your youth but still, this is an encouraging assurance that it's not you it's him, isn't it? My favorite Sonnet is 119. That's a sonnet for a girl who's been around, let me tell you.
Or Anne Sexton. Or read "Daddy" and count yourself lucky. Or William Carlos Williams. Read To Elsie, where "the pure products of America go crazy" -- this is a poem for someone who grew up in ugliness and maybe beat it, a wonderful show of understanding and empathy for those who could not. It ends with poignancy, and if you don't feel the fire of "gotta keep kicking against the pricks" then you are Elsie and have a friend in Williams: "It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off/No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car."
Poetry makes you think bigger, in spite of yourself.
The season of hearts and flowers has, thankfully, just slid by -- the cinemas are still filled with date night Rom Coms but that will pass soon enough. Still, the season has led me back to easy-to-read, because so often read before, poetry.
I find myself drawn to the cadence and language, and the shimmer of the big ideas behind the beautiful words. Reading poetry, especially familiar poetry, is soothing and soul-feeding -- it feels like rubbing fingers against smooth and warm worry beads and is a faithful reminder that the quotidien is not all there is.
Poetry soothes as music does, holding a rhythm akin to heartbeat. Shakes up the brainwaves at the same time.
Try it. Try reading Auden, my best friend when not in the thrall of Eliot (I did say it's great to return to the familiar) or even the Sonnets: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds".... Okay, so you grew tired of this one after all those weddings of your youth but still, this is an encouraging assurance that it's not you it's him, isn't it? My favorite Sonnet is 119. That's a sonnet for a girl who's been around, let me tell you.
Or Anne Sexton. Or read "Daddy" and count yourself lucky. Or William Carlos Williams. Read To Elsie, where "the pure products of America go crazy" -- this is a poem for someone who grew up in ugliness and maybe beat it, a wonderful show of understanding and empathy for those who could not. It ends with poignancy, and if you don't feel the fire of "gotta keep kicking against the pricks" then you are Elsie and have a friend in Williams: "It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off/No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car."
Poetry makes you think bigger, in spite of yourself.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Chick Lit
I know it is a huge money-maker for publishers and movie companies alike but so-called chick lit irritates me. Shopaholic? Get over yourself. Bridget? Too hapless by half. I swear we women do ourselves no service by having these heroes in our lives.
So imagine my acute surprise to discover myself addicted to books by Marian Keyes. These are uber-chick lit and I cannot put them down. I hope Marian is in some garret in Ireland somewhere typing her fingers to bloody stumps because I am very nearly finished the entire oeuvre.
These books should have nothing going for them according to me, with my current and perpetual prejudices -- they take place in the UK, there are many cute Britsy phrases ("dashing over the road to the shops" when you mean crossing a major artery to go to a store); there are references to places and "shops" that are strictly off-limits as all of the above are reminders of he who must not be remembered. Worst of all, love always turns out just fine in these books, and this is super-verboten.
Still, Keyes' books are charming and funny, lighthearted in fact, which is exactly what we need in heavy February, when the sun has gone missing for what is now months at a stretch. The characters are not so much hapless and quirky as they are completely mad, or vile but in a funny way. In Anybody Out There? a sister consoles her very recently and heartbreakingly widowed sibling by saying "lucky you he didn't run off with some other woman or I'd have to kill him" or words to that effect; this is comfortingly familiar in that it is precisely the kind of consolation my mother would give me, she being of the "it could always be worse" school of sympathy (sic).
Keyes' stories are set in big cities rife with amusing and attractive men -- this is where they veer into full-on fairy tale but not without precedent. She is not so far from Jane Austen -- I know there are lots of nuances in Austen, I'm not denying that, but it is kind of frustrating that no matter how desolate the village or impoverished the girl there is always a dashing man "just over the road" to save her from a life of squalor. I live in a city of millions and I can assure you there is no dashing man anywhere in sight.
Rules are made to be broken, and the rule against chick lit is hereby bent. Do try the Keyes backlist. These books add a ray of sunshine to a foggy day.
So imagine my acute surprise to discover myself addicted to books by Marian Keyes. These are uber-chick lit and I cannot put them down. I hope Marian is in some garret in Ireland somewhere typing her fingers to bloody stumps because I am very nearly finished the entire oeuvre.
These books should have nothing going for them according to me, with my current and perpetual prejudices -- they take place in the UK, there are many cute Britsy phrases ("dashing over the road to the shops" when you mean crossing a major artery to go to a store); there are references to places and "shops" that are strictly off-limits as all of the above are reminders of he who must not be remembered. Worst of all, love always turns out just fine in these books, and this is super-verboten.
Still, Keyes' books are charming and funny, lighthearted in fact, which is exactly what we need in heavy February, when the sun has gone missing for what is now months at a stretch. The characters are not so much hapless and quirky as they are completely mad, or vile but in a funny way. In Anybody Out There? a sister consoles her very recently and heartbreakingly widowed sibling by saying "lucky you he didn't run off with some other woman or I'd have to kill him" or words to that effect; this is comfortingly familiar in that it is precisely the kind of consolation my mother would give me, she being of the "it could always be worse" school of sympathy (sic).
Keyes' stories are set in big cities rife with amusing and attractive men -- this is where they veer into full-on fairy tale but not without precedent. She is not so far from Jane Austen -- I know there are lots of nuances in Austen, I'm not denying that, but it is kind of frustrating that no matter how desolate the village or impoverished the girl there is always a dashing man "just over the road" to save her from a life of squalor. I live in a city of millions and I can assure you there is no dashing man anywhere in sight.
Rules are made to be broken, and the rule against chick lit is hereby bent. Do try the Keyes backlist. These books add a ray of sunshine to a foggy day.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Women's Murder Club
Here is a life-saving tip: The bleak, grey, flat middle of winter is no time for serious endeavour. And certainly no time for serious literature.
One year at about this time I embarked upon What is the What, a terrific book on the right day but a killer at this time of year. The world described therein seemed so relentlessly awful I thought I might as well hang myself. Another year, or maybe it was the same year, I took this time to de-tox, extruding the excesses of holiday spirit, and learned that life without tox is barely worth living.
This is a time of year to eat up Cosmo magazine and any Rom-Com you can find -- does a movie have Meg Ryan in it? Julia Roberts? Cameron Diaz in a pinch? Great! Bring it on!! I am addicted now to W-network, or the "women's" network (the word "pathetic" is silent) and have seen every single episode of Sex and the City and Friends at least a dozen times, have watched Hugh Grant pull his forelock fetchingly over and over again, and have seen so many happy endings I am coming to believe there is no other kind. Desperate measures are required in order to overcome the bloody weather.
The newest entry for the Friday night attentions of single women everywhere is a TV series based on James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, which I had never heard of until television did them over. I have never been drawn to Patterson and always thought of him as a super-jock in the murder mystery arena. So this chick-lit thing of his intrigued me.
In the TV version, Angie Harmon has the role of the lead woman, Lindsay Boxer, a San Fran homicide detective who takes time out from her intense murder investigations to drink margaritas with her girlfriends at a bar called Susie's or something. Angie has learned a lot about policing from her time at Law&Order; she's good in this role but nonetheless she looks a bit like a man in drag and it makes no sense that we are to believe she's the hot one. Doesn't matter. This is Chick-TV and I'm all over it.
The oddness of James Patterson doing something along the lines of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series led me to the bookstore, and for reasons of bookstore inventory I have started the series at No. 2, cleverly called 2nd Chance.
It is drek. Funny enough, it doesn't matter. Like bad junk food you just can't stop eating it up, and though the premise falls apart a bit and the big Kaboom of the "reveal" tends to whimper, it does take your mind off the drizzle.
Patterson is a best-selling author and there's no accounting for it really, except that the pages turn effortlessly which is, I suppose, what it takes to sell that many books. He is no writer. For example, he doesn't dally with explaining much -- we learn that the four women of the "club" (Boxer, a detective; a medical examiner; an assistant DA; a crime reporter) are "like sisters" because they keep saying so. So much for character development.
Patterson is such a clumsy writer it sort of makes writing look super-easy, in the way an abstract painting can look like something your kid could do. Except your kid didn't do it, and if given the chance to try you would discover that actually, your kid can't do it. I thought briefly, before I became engrossed in it, that really, I should just write one of these things myself. I know I can't.
Patterson is doing what I could not do myself. His dopey Murder Club is capable of being entertaining when it is darn hard to think of a good reason to get out of bed and put your boots on for another slog in the slush. For that he deserves every penny he has earned.
One year at about this time I embarked upon What is the What, a terrific book on the right day but a killer at this time of year. The world described therein seemed so relentlessly awful I thought I might as well hang myself. Another year, or maybe it was the same year, I took this time to de-tox, extruding the excesses of holiday spirit, and learned that life without tox is barely worth living.
This is a time of year to eat up Cosmo magazine and any Rom-Com you can find -- does a movie have Meg Ryan in it? Julia Roberts? Cameron Diaz in a pinch? Great! Bring it on!! I am addicted now to W-network, or the "women's" network (the word "pathetic" is silent) and have seen every single episode of Sex and the City and Friends at least a dozen times, have watched Hugh Grant pull his forelock fetchingly over and over again, and have seen so many happy endings I am coming to believe there is no other kind. Desperate measures are required in order to overcome the bloody weather.
The newest entry for the Friday night attentions of single women everywhere is a TV series based on James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, which I had never heard of until television did them over. I have never been drawn to Patterson and always thought of him as a super-jock in the murder mystery arena. So this chick-lit thing of his intrigued me.
In the TV version, Angie Harmon has the role of the lead woman, Lindsay Boxer, a San Fran homicide detective who takes time out from her intense murder investigations to drink margaritas with her girlfriends at a bar called Susie's or something. Angie has learned a lot about policing from her time at Law&Order; she's good in this role but nonetheless she looks a bit like a man in drag and it makes no sense that we are to believe she's the hot one. Doesn't matter. This is Chick-TV and I'm all over it.
The oddness of James Patterson doing something along the lines of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series led me to the bookstore, and for reasons of bookstore inventory I have started the series at No. 2, cleverly called 2nd Chance.
It is drek. Funny enough, it doesn't matter. Like bad junk food you just can't stop eating it up, and though the premise falls apart a bit and the big Kaboom of the "reveal" tends to whimper, it does take your mind off the drizzle.
Patterson is a best-selling author and there's no accounting for it really, except that the pages turn effortlessly which is, I suppose, what it takes to sell that many books. He is no writer. For example, he doesn't dally with explaining much -- we learn that the four women of the "club" (Boxer, a detective; a medical examiner; an assistant DA; a crime reporter) are "like sisters" because they keep saying so. So much for character development.
Patterson is such a clumsy writer it sort of makes writing look super-easy, in the way an abstract painting can look like something your kid could do. Except your kid didn't do it, and if given the chance to try you would discover that actually, your kid can't do it. I thought briefly, before I became engrossed in it, that really, I should just write one of these things myself. I know I can't.
Patterson is doing what I could not do myself. His dopey Murder Club is capable of being entertaining when it is darn hard to think of a good reason to get out of bed and put your boots on for another slog in the slush. For that he deserves every penny he has earned.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Big Think
Big Think seems like a good idea. It's a facebook for smarty-pants, a MySpace for intellectuals, a meeting place and distribution centre for Big Ideas.
What it actually is, is boring.
How is this possible?
I wonder if this website is simply an old concept hiding behind new drapery. Essentially the premise is, this is where to go for the brainiest new thinking from very intelligent people. That sounds compelling. And yet it is not.
When you think about it, any good magazine is a clearing house of ideas and trends and acute observations; when you Big Think about it, all turns into earnest and academic chuntering on about stuff that might matter but to whom exactly?
A case in point: Why are you a vegan? Oh jeez, do I CARE???
What it actually is, is boring.
How is this possible?
I wonder if this website is simply an old concept hiding behind new drapery. Essentially the premise is, this is where to go for the brainiest new thinking from very intelligent people. That sounds compelling. And yet it is not.
When you think about it, any good magazine is a clearing house of ideas and trends and acute observations; when you Big Think about it, all turns into earnest and academic chuntering on about stuff that might matter but to whom exactly?
A case in point: Why are you a vegan? Oh jeez, do I CARE???
The problem is, I think, and I don't big think, is that these are ideas without the grounding in "why" -- good ideas for most of us, and certainly the most of us that make a website work, become GREAT when they become relevant. Esoteric is merely that; greatness comes in touching the soul, moving the heart, inspiring many other minds to bigger things. Without the grounding an idea is Rapunzel -- something we can see, sometimes, but cannot touch.
I heard about this site from the great NYT, and it was too early for Times to tell if the site was actually GOOD.
In any given issue of said Times, and certainly any issue of the magazine, I am inspired to be more than myself. I'm inspired to think about why 'good' is moral; why those delightful all-accepting totally optimistic souls with Williams Syndrome nonetheless fail to connect; who is really controlling the economy and how. There is a big idea -- blue sky -- and grounding. Perfect earth.
Not so this website.
I believe we are living in a visual age, a casual age, a discombolutated multi-tasking mad-paced dissociated age. We need not just intellect but soul. Ideas and heart.
The idea behind BigThink is big, and beautiful. But it needs to feel as well as think in order to be truly relevant.
That's what I think, anyway.
But don't let me tell you what to think. Check it out for yourself. http://www.bigthink.com/
Good readers
One of my great friends is tangent-oriented. He read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while on a beach in Jamaica and then consumed Robert Louis Stevenson from there, drifting to Treasure Island (yes, more appropriate to the locale) and others, and now is on a serious Victorian kick.
Current faves include Sherlock Holmes. Interestingly, Holmes really is a cocaine addict, which seems most modern, and in A Study in Scarlet, the first novel, is devoid of any interests other than those pertaining to forensic detective work.
What's intersting, if it is, is that these characters and others, like little Alice who goes to Wonderland, seem like someone we know. In truth we do not.
And so I picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to see what really went on there, as well as a few Dickens tomes just to make sure Oliver Twist is who I thought he was. I am going to dip into Holmes as well, insufferable as he seems, just to get to know him a bit better.
Current faves include Sherlock Holmes. Interestingly, Holmes really is a cocaine addict, which seems most modern, and in A Study in Scarlet, the first novel, is devoid of any interests other than those pertaining to forensic detective work.
What's intersting, if it is, is that these characters and others, like little Alice who goes to Wonderland, seem like someone we know. In truth we do not.
And so I picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to see what really went on there, as well as a few Dickens tomes just to make sure Oliver Twist is who I thought he was. I am going to dip into Holmes as well, insufferable as he seems, just to get to know him a bit better.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The Misanthrope
AA Gill has a poison pen dipped in sulphurous vitriol. And my word he's funny. Yes he says what you would say if you had the courage or the clever or the refreshing lack of what we call "filters".
Read this and weep. With laughter. I did.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/a_a_gill/article3150287.ece?Submitted=true
Read this and weep. With laughter. I did.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/a_a_gill/article3150287.ece?Submitted=true
Monday, January 7, 2008
See you in the funny pages
It is a rare event to find something laugh-out-loud funny in the business section. In fact, we could suggest it is near never-happens rare.
But, the NYT business section last week had a story about the battle between Jay Leno, a funny man with a late night talk show, and David Letterman, also allegedly funny and with a late night talk show.
There is a writers' strike in the US right now that is threatening the very fabric of the country, meaning that very soon there will be nothing new to watch on TV. Whether anyone actually notices is another issue but it is certainly riling up some people, mostly the writers themselves.
These writers have made a deal with Letterman such that they can for some Byzantine reason write for him despite this strike; not so Leno who decided what the hell, I used to be a funny guy, I'll just do it myself.
He did, and people laughed their heads off; his ratings soared. Letterman, despite the phalanx of writers, was not so funny. Ratings there soured.
What a quandry!! The writers' guilds then went into swift action, saying that Leno MUST NOT BE FUNNY until the end of the strike. He must not write his own stuff, he must sit still and wait for them to figure this problem out. And it is a big problem. If he's funny without them, what do THEY do for a living? My god, is it possible that Leno can DO HIS JOB?? Are writers obsolete? Is Letterman just plain boring? So many questions! So few answers!
So the writers are flipping out. Leno says too bad, seems I'm pretty good at this and I'm going to keep on keepin' on.
Now, here is the metaphysical issue that the writers could do some thinking upon in their newly-acquired strike-permitted spare time: is it the WRITING that is the problem? So, if Leno just stood up and said stuff off the top of his head would that be okay? Is there a difference between what he thinks up and what he writes down? There cannot be...so where is their guild's jurisdiction?
Not to put a damper on a good story. I cannot wait for the next episode.
But, the NYT business section last week had a story about the battle between Jay Leno, a funny man with a late night talk show, and David Letterman, also allegedly funny and with a late night talk show.
There is a writers' strike in the US right now that is threatening the very fabric of the country, meaning that very soon there will be nothing new to watch on TV. Whether anyone actually notices is another issue but it is certainly riling up some people, mostly the writers themselves.
These writers have made a deal with Letterman such that they can for some Byzantine reason write for him despite this strike; not so Leno who decided what the hell, I used to be a funny guy, I'll just do it myself.
He did, and people laughed their heads off; his ratings soared. Letterman, despite the phalanx of writers, was not so funny. Ratings there soured.
What a quandry!! The writers' guilds then went into swift action, saying that Leno MUST NOT BE FUNNY until the end of the strike. He must not write his own stuff, he must sit still and wait for them to figure this problem out. And it is a big problem. If he's funny without them, what do THEY do for a living? My god, is it possible that Leno can DO HIS JOB?? Are writers obsolete? Is Letterman just plain boring? So many questions! So few answers!
So the writers are flipping out. Leno says too bad, seems I'm pretty good at this and I'm going to keep on keepin' on.
Now, here is the metaphysical issue that the writers could do some thinking upon in their newly-acquired strike-permitted spare time: is it the WRITING that is the problem? So, if Leno just stood up and said stuff off the top of his head would that be okay? Is there a difference between what he thinks up and what he writes down? There cannot be...so where is their guild's jurisdiction?
Not to put a damper on a good story. I cannot wait for the next episode.
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